By Paul Homewood
Rightly the Telegraph gets slammed again by the Comments section:
Searing temperatures have put Greece on top of the list of the deadliest places in Europe for heat deaths, according to new research.
Other popular Mediterranean holiday destinations, such as Italy and Spain, are also among the leading continental nations for fatalities linked to extreme heat.
Scientists from the IS Global Institute in Barcelona analysed the impact of heatwaves in 800 regions in 35 European countries in 2023, finding a total of 47,690 deaths attributable to high temperatures.
Greece came out worst for deaths caused by heat as a proportion of the population with 393 per one million inhabitants, followed by Bulgaria (229), Italy (209) and Spain (175).
Cyprus, Portugal, Malta and Croatia were next on the so-called “heat-death list”, highlighting the extent to which southern European summers are being marked by searing heatwaves.
While the list refers to last year, the outlook for Greece in 2024 does not appear to improve, with its hottest summer on record being predicted by forecasters.
Firefighters are already battling wildfires caused by high temperatures in a country that is on the front line of climate change.
As many point out, it is always hot in Greece during summer – that is why we go on holiday then.
Nowhere is there any mention in this silly article of the fact that cold kills many times more people, even in Greece, as confirmed in a recent Lancet study:
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2023/08/06/lancets-misleading-excess-mortality-chart/
As Bjorn Lomborg pointed out, The Lancet had been caught posting misleading images. Their graph, on the left, suggests that death rates in Greece are similar for heat and cold. The right hand graph shows the actual data:
But most ludicrous of all is this paragraph near the end of the Telegraph story:
In other words they are not talking about actual excess deaths, or even modelled ones. Instead they accept that heat-related mortality has progessively decreased in recent decades, thanks to fossil fuels. Without those fossil fuels, they say, deaths would have been higher!