There’s a reason we’ve heard so much about extreme heat deaths this summer: UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres made a “call to action” in extreme heat that prompted mandarins in his vast organization to issue warnings without letting facts get in the way of a good story.

World Health Organization trumpets the disturbing discovery that in Europe, over 175,000 people die annually from extreme heat. It was a fourfold exaggeration. When cryORGANIZATION they quietly edited their online publication to remove the word “extreme” – only after media outlets have reported the catastrophic news. Although he fixed the error online, he failed to mention that extreme heat is the lowest temperature risk for Europe, with cold killing 13 times as many people. That would not fit with the Secretary-General’s call to action.

UNICEF, the organization dedicated to child welfare, was the next to sound the alarm. It published a policy paper claiming 377 young people died in 2021 from high temperatures in Europe and Central Asia. He failed to mention that their data show that annual heat-related deaths have been declining for over three decades, that the cold causes about three times as many deaths annually in these regions, or that heat is one of the least significant causes of death in this age group. For an organization dedicated to child welfare, perhaps it should matter more that malnutrition claims the lives of 26,000 young people in the region annually.

By using wrong data and telling distorted stories, WHO and UNICEF have put political messaging ahead of data integrity to suit the narrow climate focus coming from the Secretary-General’s office.

Guterres could hardly be more alarmist. He pointed out that heat deaths of the elderly have increased globally 85 percent in recent decadesbut he did not reveal that almost all of this increase is due to the fact that the world now has 79 percent more elderly people.

In his moving call to action, Guterres declared“Extreme heat is increasingly destroying economies, widening inequalities, undermining the Sustainable Development Goals and killing people” and he claimed there was “a rapid increase in the scale, intensity, frequency and duration of extreme heat events”.

This is not only alarming but also misleading. A landmark 2024 study on extreme heat and its effects on mortality reveals that global heatwave days have increased over the past 30 years from 13.4 to 13.7 days—hardly a rapid increase. More importantly, the global death rate from extreme heat is not increasing, but has actually decreased by more than 7% per decade.

Guterres explicitly attributed all extreme heat deaths to climate change, but this is patently untrue, as almost all extreme heat deaths are caused by the 13.4 days of heatwaves we would now be experiencing 30 years. Since then, climate change has added 0.3 days and a fraction to the declining death rate. To suggest otherwise is dishonest.

In fact, if we were to freeze the world’s age distribution, correcting for more and more old people, deaths from extreme heat have fallen by 13.9% each decade over the past 30 years. The decline is largely caused by the fact that people are richer and have more air conditioning and access to electricity.

This is the deeper problem with Guterres’ rhetoric. The best policy to avoid deaths from extreme heat – which the world has done very well in recent decades – is to ensure that more people can afford to live in cool, air-conditioned environments. Strangely, the United Nations opposes such life-saving ideas. WHO four step guide on how to avoid the dangers of extreme heat does not mention “air conditioning”. It suggests that people rely on “blinds and blinds” and “night air” and spend a few hours in the supermarket to cool off.

Lowering energy prices so more people can afford air conditioning is the opposite of what Guterres claims. He insists that the world’s “disease” is a “fossil fuel addiction.” He calls for keeping global temperature rise below a temperature limit of 1.5 Celsius, which would cost trillions of dollars, raise electricity costs and impoverish lives.

Perhaps the most damning indictment of Guterres’ “call to action” is that it focuses exclusively on the extreme heat that kills 155,000 people globally every year. The Secretary-General rarely talks about cold temperatures (unless it’s the debatable argument that extreme cold is also caused by global warming). The cold kills nearly 4.5 million people annually 30 times how much extreme heat. In a more sensible world, Guterres would focus 30 times more firepower on solving this larger problem. (They would find that lower energy prices would help the most.)

It is hard to avoid the implication that tragic heat deaths are simply a tool for the Secretary-General’s climate alarmism. At least he and the United Nations should get their numbers right.

Bjorn Lomborg is Chair of the Copenhagen Consensus and Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. Wrote this for InsideSources.com.