Is Climate Change Killing People?

A Fact-Checked Journey Through Alarmist Claims: Debunking the Billion-Death Apocalypse

In recent years, climate change has become one of the most hotly debated topics in the public sphere, particularly after the takeover of ‘X’. The media and many prominent figures have painted a picture of an impending climate apocalypse that threatens to wipe out billions of people. But is this really the case? Here, I will take a closer look at the claims made by climate alarmists and examine the evidence to see if there is any truth to their assertions that climate change is killing people.

We're bombarded with pronouncements of billions perishing under rising sea levels, cities swallowed by superstorms, and humanity choked by air thick with smog. Every heatwave, every flood, every hurricane is attributed to climate change, with dire warnings of a planet on the brink of collapse.

Headlines such as these are commonplace…

Source: https://phys.org/news/2023-08-climate-changing-human-billion-deaths-century.html

Source: https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-warn-1-billion-people-on-track-to-die-from-climate-change

There are dozens of such examples:

1. John Holdren, former science advisor to President Barack Obama, claimed in the 1980s that climate change could lead to up to one billion deaths in the 21st century.

2. In 2014, the World Health Organization (WHO) predicted that climate change could cause an additional 250,000 deaths per year between 2030 and 2050 due to factors such as heat stress, malnutrition, and the spread of infectious diseases.

3. In 2019, a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine suggested that climate change could "halt and reverse" progress made in human health over the last century, leading to many more deaths than the 250,000 a year predicted by the WHO.

4. In 2020, a report from the Global Humanitarian Forum, founded by former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, claimed that climate change was already causing 300,000 deaths per year and could lead to more than one billion deaths by 2030.

5. In 2021, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned that climate change could lead to increased mortality and morbidity due to heatwaves, floods, and other extreme weather events, as well as the spread of diseases and food insecurity.

Contrary to the claims made by climate alarmists, the data shows that you are actually safer today from climate-related disasters than at any other time in human history. According to the International Disaster Database (EM-DAT) , the number of climate-related disasters has been steadily declining since the 1920s, despite the fact that the global population has grown significantly during this time. This means that the risk of being affected by a climate-related disaster is lower today than it was a century ago.

However, EM-DAT also states that “pre-2000 data is particularly subject to reporting biases”.

So, to avoid any reporting biases let’s take a look at the human loss of life associated with weather events that have been claimed to be affected by increasing atmospheric GHG concentrations since 2000.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has reported that climate change has a significant impact on the frequency and intensity of hydrological, meteorological, and climatological disasters. According to the IPCC, the global average temperature has already risen by about 1.1 degrees Celsius since pre-industrial times, and this has led to more frequent and intense heatwaves, heavy precipitation events, and droughts.

In particular, the IPCC's Sixth Assessment Report released in 2021 states that human-induced climate change has contributed to an increase in the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events. For example, the report notes that the frequency of heavy precipitation events has increased over most land areas since the mid-20th century, and that the intensity of these events has also increased.

However, this is not apparent when looking at the recorded number of hydrological, meteorological, and climatological disasters reported by EM-DAT since 2000 (see figure below).