Last month was the hottest month that I can remember in recent memory. That is not simply anecdotal evidence on my end. The World Meteorological Association is positing that July 2023 is the hottest month on record. As we see below, global mean surface air temperature is above what it historically has been. If you read news from media outlets, we should not only be worried but downright terrified about how climate change is making extreme heat worse and very well bring the end of days. The Guardian opined that Phoenix's heat waves are testing the limits of survival. Washington Post said that this deadly heat are the alarm bells of a planet on a brink. The Atlantic asked how much longer the Southwest will be habitable. The Left-leaning Center for American Progress released a report on the health care costs of extreme heat.
Since we are in an age of global warming, it makes sense that it is going to be warmer than it was in the Little Ice Age (16-19 c.). It seems tautological, to say the least. But it is more than the planet getting warmer. It is about whether more extreme heat is wreaking more havoc on the world. Last year after Hurricane Ian, I scrutinized the media hysteria on hurricanes as it pertained to climate change. It turns out that the media was ignoring that number, frequency, and intensity of hurricanes did not increase due to climate change. Furthermore, it turns out that hurricanes have not caused more economic damage when using normalized cost trends. I would like to know if the media is exaggerating the effects of heat waves in the same way they have with hurricanes or if this time is different.
First of all, saying that this is the "hottest year on record" does not mean much when experts only have been collecting surface temperature data since the late nineteenth century (see NASA data below). There are literally centuries for which we do not have such detailed data. Nevertheless, let us use what data we do have. For context, they started collecting these data at the tail-end of the Little Ice Age. What we see with these NASA data are that the planet has warmed up by about 1° Celsius over the past 140 years. We started collecting these data at a cold period and entered a period in which the global temperatures have gradually increased over time.
Scientists have gathered surface temperature data since the late 19th century and satellites have only gathered data since the late 1970s. Aside from surface temperature data and satellite data, we only have proxy measures that a 2006 study from the National Academies of Science called "low resolution." Let's take a look at one of these proxy measures: benthic carbon and oxygen isotopes from up to 66 million years (Westerhold et al., 2020). What we see below is that in prehistoric times, the Earth's global temperature was up to 12° Celsius warmer for millions of years. In spite of those warmer temperatures, the planet survived. One can infer from this proxy measure that we could withstand a bit more heat (more on that later).
There is a factor in play with what we have since the 1880s: temperature readings are disproportionately taken in urban areas (Zhang et al., 2021). This is important since, as the European Commission points out, cities are often 10-15° Celsius warmer than the surrounding rural areas in no small part due to the urban heat island effect. As urban centers developed in the 20th century, so has the urban heat island effect. We need to keep this upward measurement bias in mind when discussing the modern temperature data we do have.
For what we do have on record prior to this year, the worst years include 2015, 2016, 2019, 2020, and 2021. In 2003, Europe had a nasty heat wave (Lhotka and Kysely, 2022). This still was not as bad as the Drought of 1540, not to mention other nasty droughts between the 11th and 15th centuries (Cook et al., 2015). This illustrates how extreme weather situations existed in pre-modern times, which is to say that hot summer days do not automatically mean climate change.
As for the United States, we have data to show that the worst heat waves have not taken place this decade. Data from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) shows that the worst heat waves in known history comes from the Dust Bowl era in the 1930s, not this century.
One more interesting chart on U.S. data, this one showing the number of warm spells. This chart below comes from the government's Climate Science Special Report. In Chapter 6 of the report, we see that the length of warm spells has decreased since the Dust Bowl era and started to pick up again in 1970s. The figure plateaued in the 21st century.
This same government report shows another peculiar trend. If we are to compare the highest temperatures between 1986 and 2016 versus that between 1901 and 1960, what we see is that the highs were warmer in the first part of the 20th century. If the massive increase in greenhouse gas emissions are supposed to cause greater temperatures, why are we seeing most parts of the United States have lower highs than in previous years?
An important question to ask is what sort of impact heat waves have. One is that of droughts because heat waves can exacerbate drought, which has impact on agriculture and general water availability. I went to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report to answer this question. I did see multiple regions dealing with a low level of increased drought (IPCC, p. 10). What I did not see is a high level of drought that would correspond with the media sensationalism.
What about people dying from extreme heat? The Lancet published a study covering 854 European cities between 2000 and 2019 (Masselot et al, 2023). The study found that extreme cold was way more likely to kill than extreme heat (more than ten times likely), as we see from the study's chart below. Take a look at the x-axis of the chart.
What is the difference? The scaling for extreme cold deaths is not the same as that for extreme heat. The scaling is about 1:6, which is to say that the authors of the study exaggerated the excess death rate by about sixfold to make their point. If you make the scaling equal by using a 1:1 scale, you see an even more obvious picture, which is that extreme cold is way worse than extreme heat. Based on figures in the Lancet study, Bjorn Lomborg was able to extrapolate that rising temperatures are able to save over 150,000 lives a year. The truth is that the largest source of temperature-related mortality is the extreme cold, not extreme heat.
And if that were not enough, there was decline of around 50 percent in global heat wave deaths between 1980 and 2016 (Formetta and Feyen, 2019, see below). Not only are the fatalities much smaller than extreme cold deaths, but heat-related fatality rates have been on the decline. Another study showing heat mortality data for the United States shows a similar decline in heat-related mortality (Sheridan et al., 2021).
This is not to say that there is no cost to warmer summers. What we do see in the data is that the concern is nowhere near where it needs to be to justify panic. That is because climate change is not an apocalyptic disaster. We have seen environmentalists use fear and alarmism multiple times where the event did not pan out, whether that was it deforestation, acid rain, the death of the Great Barrier Reef, a nuclear winter, or Rachel Carson's The Silent Spring. If people stopped using worst-case, low-probability models to justify the fears, we would not be in such a panic. Climate change is a manageable problem. How do we manage it? Adaptation is our best bet because it has already worked.
As already illustrated, weather-related deaths have decreased about 96 percent in the past century, even with population growth. Instead participating in a secular form of self-flagellation, we should embrace the technology we have to make our lives better. We can do more to mitigate the effects of warmer summers with air conditioning, fresh drinking water, swimming pools, and electric fans. We could fight the heat waves by asking for subsidies on air conditioners, painting streets white to reflect the sunlight, or working towards cheaper energy (especially nuclear power). These are superior policy options compared to dealing with climate change by forcing electric vehicles on the American people, gas stove bans, implementing cap-and-trade, or using really strict water heater energy efficiency standards. Do-good policy beats feel-good policy and looking at the data for what they are beats the sensationalism around so-called "global boiling."
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