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

The World Health Organization trumpeted the disturbing discovery that in Europe, more than 175,000 people die each year from extreme heat. It was a quadruple exaggeration. When calledthe organization discreetly edited their online publication to remove the word “extreme” – only after the media had relayed the catastrophic news. Although it corrected the error online, it failed to mention that extreme heat poses the lowest temperature risk for Europe, with cold killing 13 times more people. This would not correspond to the Secretary-General’s call for action.

UNICEF, the organization dedicated to child protection, was the next to sound the alarm. It released a policy brief claiming that 377 young people died in 2021 due to high temperatures in Europe and Central Asia. It doesn’t mention that their data shows that annual heat deaths have fallen by more than half in three decades, that cold causes about three times as many deaths each year in these regions, or that heat is one of the least important causes of death in this age group. For an organization dedicated to child protection, it might be more important that malnutrition kills 26,000 young people each year in the region.

By using faulty data and telling biased stories, WHO and UNICEF have put political messaging ahead of data integrity to match the narrow focus on climate of the secretary-general’s office.

Guterres could hardly be more alarmist. He noted that heat deaths among the elderly have increased globally. 85 percent in recent decadesbut it failed to reveal that almost all of this increase is due to the fact that the world now has 79% more older people.

In his moving call to action, Guterres declared“Extreme heat is increasingly devastating economies, widening inequalities, undermining 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 2024 milestone study on extreme heat and its effects on mortality reveals that the number of heatwave days globally has increased over the last 30 years, from 13.4 to 13.7 days – which is not a rapid increase. More importantly, the global death rate from extreme heat is not increasing but has actually declined by more than 7% per decade.

Guterres has explicitly blamed all deaths from extreme heat on climate change, but this is completely false, as almost all deaths from extreme heat are due to the 13.4 days of heat waves we would have endured ago 30 years old. Since then, climate change has added 0.3 days and a fraction to the decline in the death rate. To suggest otherwise is misleading.

In fact, if we were to freeze the world’s age distribution, incorporating ever more older people, deaths from extreme heat would have declined by 13.9% each decade over the past 30 years. This decline is largely due to people being wealthier and having more access to air conditioning and electricity.

This is the deeper problem with Guterres’ rhetoric. The best policy to prevent deaths from extreme heat – something 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 balks at such life-saving ideas. WHO four-step guide on how to avoid the dangers of extreme heat does not mention “air conditioning”. This suggests that people rely on “blinds and shutters” and “night air” and spend a few hours at the supermarket to cool off.

Lowering energy prices so more people can afford air conditioning is the opposite of what Guterres advocates. He insists that the global “disease” is “fossil fuel addiction.” It demands that we keep global temperature rise below a limit of 1.5 Celsius, which would cost trillions of dollars, drive up electricity costs and impoverish lives.

Perhaps the most damning criticism of Guterres’ “call to action” is that it focuses exclusively on the extreme heat that kills 155,000 people worldwide each year. The Secretary-General rarely talks about cold temperatures (unless it is to make the dubious argument that extreme cold is also caused by global warming). Cold kills nearly 4.5 million people per year 30 times as much as extreme heat. In a more sensible world, Guterres would devote 30 times more firepower to solving this larger problem. (He would find that lower energy prices would help the most.)

It’s hard to avoid suggesting that tragic heat deaths are just a tool for the secretary-general’s climate alarmism. At the very least, he and the United Nations should have decent numbers.

Bjorn Lomborg is chair of the Copenhagen Consensus and a visiting scholar at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He wrote this for InsideSources.com.