Is climate change really causing hundreds of UK deaths?

Given the power that the daily statistics of Covid deaths have exerted over us this year, it was only a matter of time before we started being bamboozled with terrifying figures of the estimated death toll from climate change. Sure enough, the latest issue of Nature Climate Change contains a widely-reported paper by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and the University of Bern, which attempts to quantify the death toll from higher global temperatures. The scientists ran a simulation which they claim predicted what the weather would have been like in recent years had it not been for man-made climate change. They then reached the conclusion that man-made climate change was responsible for a third of heat-related deaths, leading to an extra 82 deaths a year in London, 141 in New York and 156 in Tokyo.

Let’s leave aside the argument of how much of the rise in temperatures over the past few decades can be attributed to human activity and how much is natural, and assume that all of it has been caused by greenhouse gas emissions.