Fresh from a summer season in Mystic Meg’s fairground tent, the weather attribution queen Friederike Otto has returned to Imperial College to bring news that 50,391 heat-related deaths occurred in 854 European cities in June, July and August, while 32,619 fatalities were attributed to human-caused climate change.
Such precision! A feature of all good clairvoyants, and a skill we might conclude is honed in the company of more commercially-minded soothsayers. Who needs doctors to tell us if we are dead and provide a certificated cause when Madame Otto is consulting in front of her computer crystal ball. Of course, the precise figures are not based on actual fatality data but are modelled estimates using population numbers and previous historical stats on temperature and summer mortality. In fact, data on historical mortality and temperature were only sought from 232 cities but, details, details! when a computer model can fill in any gaps.
The almost instant pseudoscience paper was written by, among others, several activists associated with Imperial including Otto and is titled ‘Heat-related urban mortality attributable to human-induced climate change in Europe in summer 2026’. As might be expected from a college with a world-class reputation for worrying everyone witless with computer modelled junk, its tone is highly political. At one point the authors claim that the world is “nearly” 1.5°C warmer without giving a checkable timeline, while “around” 1.4°C is attributable to human activity, primarily the burning of fossil fuels. There is not a scintilla of convincing scientific proof to back up this latter claim. In the opening abstract, the authors state that their results highlight the threat from human-caused warming “and the need for rapid emissions reductions”.
In other words, the need for the Marxist-inspired Net Zero fantasy. While this evil, little understood project was all the rage a few years ago, these days it comes with a much wider understanding that a world without hydrocarbons is a world facing starvation and mass death, along with societal and economic collapse. Don’t be poor in this brave new world.
