There's a catastrophic black hole in our climate data and it's a gift to deniers | George Monbiot

"I began by trying to discover whether or not a widespread belief was true. In doing so, I tripped across something even bigger: an index of the world's indifference. I already knew that by burning fossil fuels, gorging on meat and dairy, and failing to make even simple changes, the rich world imposes a massive burden of disaster, displacement and death on people whose responsibility for the climate crisis is minimal."

"The figure comes from a study using the widest available datasets to try to produce a global view. The results are, to say the least, surprising. For example, it suggests that even in the hottest parts of the world, more people die of cold than from heat. In fact, sub-Saharan Africa appears to have the world's highest rate of deaths from cold and the world's lowest rate of deaths from heat."

Global estimates claiming far more cold-related than heat-related deaths are based on limited, non-representative datasets that produce counterintuitive results. The dataset covers 750 locations in 43 countries but excludes most of the world's hottest countries and many regions with weak healthcare. Reported results imply that even the hottest regions have higher cold mortality and that sub-Saharan Africa experiences 58 times more cold deaths than heat deaths. Such findings likely reflect data gaps and sampling bias rather than true global mortality patterns, leading to a substantial underestimation of heat-related deaths and distorted policy implications.

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