Thread by @BjornLomborg

Untrue Washington Post front-page story today

Claims “disasters worsen”
Study shows 𝗻𝗼 𝘀𝘂𝗰𝗵 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗴

One example: heart disease up with temperature
Reality 𝗼𝗽𝗽𝗼𝘀𝗶𝘁𝗲

How is this following science?

🧵

washingtonpost.com/climate-enviro…
archive.md/m4z4d
@SallyBuzbee

Washington Post story over and again claims study shows how climate made things worse:

“weather events made worse by climate change”, “harsher events” “disasters worsen”

Actual Nature study only shows impacts – not whether positive or negative

nature.com/articles/s4155…

Actual Nature study doesn't show climate making stuff worse

It simply uses machine learning to analyze 600K article abstracts to identify climate impacts and code *where* and *what*

Conclude 85% pop lives where temp and/or precip changed detectable and attributable to man

Take a look at the three studies the Nature study highlights as their goal to map all studies:

Ref32 is a standard climate article on West Africa showing more warm nights and days, fewer cold nights and days, and increased rainfall

(all as expected)

rmets.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.100…

Another reference (ref30) is slightly odd, as it is not about people:

It shows

a significant delay in hibernation emergence of adult females in a wild population of 𝗖𝗼𝗹𝘂𝗺𝗯𝗶𝗮𝗻 𝗴𝗿𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗱 𝘀𝗾𝘂𝗶𝗿𝗿𝗲𝗹𝘀 in Canada

nature.com/articles/natur…

Third ref (ref31) is likely story ref by WashPost

Chinese article with English abstract, showing low temperature means higher ischemic heart disease mortality, with no observed effect from high temp

Entirely opposite story of WashPost

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27903363/

WashPost claims that "deaths from heart disease had risen in areas experiencing hotter conditions"

which is exactly the opposite of what the quoted paper found:

Low temp associated with increased heart IHD mortality risk, no risk of high temp

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27903363/

WashPost claims that "deaths from heart disease had risen in areas experiencing hotter conditions"

which is exactly the opposite of what the Global Burden of Disease shows for entire world:

low temperatures kill 10x more through cardiovascular diseases than do heat

WashPost also claims that the study "focused on events such as crop failures, floods and heat waves"

It did not

It actually almost exclusively looked at temperature and precipitation (*all* other things are the small red boxes, color-replaced for clarity, from their figure 3)

WashPost claims study makes solid link between escalating extremes and human activities

Triply incorrect

The study doesn't show extremes escalating, it doesn't link them, because of the simple point it doesn't look at extremes

Article even writes this just a bit further down

WashPost and @SallyBuzbee:

Climate change is a real problem that needs smart solutions

But incorrect, alarmist, and false climate stories are undesirable and unhelpful

they don't belong anywhere, least of all on your front-page

Pls fix/delete this story

[When looking at their coding (zenodo.org/record/5257271…), this article, which is not about climate, just temperature, is coded as showing temperature having a documented impact

This is true, but not from climate

Makes me wonder about all others?]