Across the United States and Europe, the media are warning of dangerously high temperatures.
“Extreme Heat Is Breaking America,” warns the New York Times. “Lethal heat is Europe’s new climate reality,” adds Politico.
It’s an annual routine: Expect to be inundated with alarming stories about heat domes, heat deaths and heat waves, pointing to the urgency of climate action.
But this narrative will tell you only a misleading fraction of the story.
The impacts of heat waves are stark and immediately visible, meaning they are photogenic and coverage is click-worthy.
Heat kills within just a few days of temperatures going up, because it swiftly alters the electrolytic balance in weaker, often older people.
These deaths are tragic and often preventable, and we hear about them every summer.
But the media seldom report on deaths from cold.
Cold kills slowly — often over months. In low temperatures, the body constricts peripheral blood vessels to conserve heat, raising blood pressure.
But deaths from cold far outnumber those from heat. The most comprehensive Lancet study shows that while heat kills nearly half a million people globally each year, cold kills more than 4.5 million — i.e., nine times more.
Yet, perversely, global media instead write nine times more stories about heat waves than cold waves.
We deserve to know which is the bigger threat.
We should know, for example, that the United States sees more than 80,000 deaths from cold each year, vastly outweighing its 8,000 heat deaths.
In Latin America and Europe, cold deaths outweigh heat deaths 4 to 1. In Africa, astonishingly, it’s 46 to 1.
Even in India — where the Western media have fixated on extreme heat this year — cold deaths outnumber those from heat 7 to 1.
Hellbound and Down 