For a decade, the formerly respectable and prestigious journal of medical science the Lancet has been producing an annual report of climate-related health metrics. The 10th Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change was published this week, and it again produces a number of headline statistics that drive the broader ‘climate crisis’ narrative. Such stats are invariably wielded by green commentators, not just to illustrate the urgent necessity of Making Energy Expensive Again but to show what hateful, morally grotesque, deplorable fiends we climate sceptics – without any medical and climate science qualifications between us – are. But how robust are the Lancet’s statistics?
The Lancet’s press release makes it plain that the work it does is intended to drive political action:
The 10th indicator report of the Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change suggests that some of the health harms of climate change grew faster in the decade since the Paris Agreement entered into force (2016-2025) than in the previous decade (2006-2015) as climate action fails to keep pace.
“Fails to keep pace,” it claims. The Lancet’s Editor, Richard Horton, has in the past made no secret of his attempts to weaponise both health statistics and the cultural authority of medical science and doctors. After all, whom do you trust more: policymakers or paediatric oncologists? And so, if such selfless, disinterested people as those who cure cancer are telling you that the planet is boiling, then you better believe it. “The climate emergency is a more far-reaching public health emergency of international concern than COVID-19. It’s time to accelerate our actions towards decarbonisation, renewable energy, and a green recovery,” said Horton to an Extinction Rebellion protest in 2021.
So now we evil deniers are up against not only the seemingly overwhelming weight of evidence produced by climate science, we’re also pitched against the world’s top physicians. The intervention of doctors links the seemingly abstract and remote issue of climate change with concrete ‘climate impacts’: people are literally dying, according to this ‘science’.
“Annual average heat-related deaths rose by nearly 36% globally after the Paris Agreement was introduced,” says the report. “In 2023 alone, heat was linked to a record 710,000 deaths with more than 70% of that toll attributable to human-caused climate change.”
But how were these data produced, and what do they really say? The report states that “estimates [of heat-related mortality] for all countries” were “obtained by combining state-of-the-art meta-prediction models with yearly mortality estimates from the Global Burden of Disease study”. The Global Burden of Disease (GBD) study is an impressively extensive searchable database relating to health data of all kinds compiled by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. So we can obtain the raw data for ourselves.
