The problem with calculating climate-related excess deaths

Another week, another extravagant claim for climatic doom goes unchallenged. Speaking on the Today programme on Wednesday morning, Dale Vince – the founder of Electrocity and donor to both Don’t Stop Oil and the Labour party – asserted: ‘40,000 people across Europe died from excess heat last summer. That’s part of the climate crisis. People are dying, people are being made homeless, whole countries are flooding.’ 

Whole countries flooding? It is unclear which countries Vince claims have flooded in their entirety, but a claim by a Pakistan government minster that a third of that country was under water in floods last summer has been thoroughly debunked by UN satellite data, which shows that the area affected by floods at some point last August was around 8 per cent.

But what about the claim that 40,000 people across Europe died from excess heat in the summer of 2022? This would appear to derive from a report published in January by reinsurance firm Gallagher Re, which made the claim: ‘Preliminary estimates based on Gallagher Re analysis of country-level excess mortality statistics, which determined totals by subtracting from recent decadal averages and Covid-19 spikes, suggested that as many as or more than 40,000 excess deaths may be attributed to the extreme heat across the continent during the summer months.