The article exposes a critical 'black hole' in our understanding of climate change impacts, challenging the widely cited claim that more people die from cold than heat. It reveals how massive data gaps and underreporting in vulnerable, hot regions, particularly in Africa, lead to a severe underestimation of heat-related deaths, driven by global indifference and hindering effective climate action and compensation.
The author began by investigating the claim that nine times as many people die from cold as from heat, a figure often used to delay climate action. While a comprehensive study initially seemed to support this, even suggesting more cold deaths in the world's hottest regions, the author discovered profound data limitations. The study's dataset primarily covered richer, cooler countries with robust health systems, lacking crucial data from most of the world's hottest and most vulnerable nations, such as much of Africa, India, and Pakistan. This meant the global trends were modeled from places where records were available, leading to significant, and potentially inaccurate, geographical extrapolation. The article highlights a catastrophic decline in weather stations across Africa, creating vast areas with no climate monitoring, which is essential for early warnings. Epidemiologists confirm that heat-related deaths are severely underreported even in countries with better records, often misattributed to other causes. This global underfunding and lack of data collection is presented as an 'index of indifference' from powerful governments towards human life, making it impossible to accurately assess 'loss and damage' caused by climate breakdown. Consequently, vulnerable nations cannot be adequately compensated, with current pledges being woefully insufficient, framing international climate summits as a 'vast shrug of rich-world indifference'.
