Reading many of the answers, it seems depressingly necessary to state that so far we've not been headed towards catastrophe, with ever-higher life expectancy, less poverty, and more education
Friday, WHO claimed that 175,000 Europeans died from extreme heat
I pointed out that was untrue, almost 4x exaggerated
Saturday morning, WHO admitted this in the smallest possible way — they simply changed their website (and address) and had some online publications delete "extreme"
But, of course, by then the story had already made its intended impact across the world
WHO believes "Climate change is the greatest threat to global health in the 21st century" — which is just laughable and one of the reasons it was caught off-guard by Covid
This belief colors the 'findings' of WHO. In their Friday statement, the WHO Europe director explicitly worries about the "climate crisis" and expressed his support for climate action costing $1,000s of trillions (1.5oC target), so he obviously would like a dramatic and large number to make it around the world
Summary: WHO told us extreme heat kills 175K+, a number they've now admitted is almost 4x exaggerated. And they don't tell you that cold deaths at 657K are almost 4x bigger than all heat deaths. This is not informing you well
Journalists have to realize that when e.g. WHO says something, it also needs to be fact-checked
Friday claim:
Saturday update:
My tweet to ask for correction (which the director hasn't replied to):
Acid rain scare in the 1980s delivered full-on panic
No more so than in Germany, where papers claimed "the forest is dying," called it an "ecological Hiroshima" and claimed ‘‘the dying of the forests will have a greater impact on our country than World War II’’
All false
The 1980s Acid Rain scare we know now was mostly false
New study: acid rain actually makes trees grow faster
Yet, a majority of Germans in 1985 believed "all forests will be dead by 2000" because of acid rain
Climate alarmists are annoyed that global climate-related disaster deaths have declined dramatically
Then they discovered how to cherry-pick deaths to look like they’re increasing
— just (indefensibly) remove the top 50 most deadly mega-disasters and rig the scales
🧵+refs
After manipulating their stats, they have the temerity to claim “Misinterpreting statistics could be harmful if it supports a discourse minimizing the importance of climate action”
I’m pretty sure misinterpreting statistics is wrong no matter what
They show low death numbers from 1900s and 1910s, but these are likely wrong ()
They have left out at least two major catastrophes, likely missing at least 20-25 million deaths from the Chinese flood in 1906, leading to famine in 1906-07, and at least 2-10 million deaths from the Persian drought leading to famine in 1917-19