Politically tinged coverage of summer temperatures offers a lot of heat but not much light.

“Deadly heat waves becoming more common due to climate change,” declares CNN. “Extreme heat waves will change how we live. We’re not ready,” warns TIME.

Some stories are more sensationalist than others, but there is a common theme: Dangerous heat waves will increase in frequency and ferocity because of global warming.

This isn’t fake news. In fact, it’s perfectly true. But these stories reveal a peculiar blind spot in the media’s climate reporting. While “deadly,” “killer,” “extreme” heat waves gain a lot of coverage, relatively scant attention is given in winter to much, much more lethal cold temperatures.

The threat of death from hot weather is dwarfed by the risk posed by cold temperatures. Moreover, as global warming progresses, the reduction in deaths from the cold is likely to be more significant than the increase in deaths from heat waves.

Heat kills when it overheats the body and alters its fluid and electrolytic balance. Cold kills because the body restricts the blood flow to the skin, increasing blood pressure, while lowering defenses against infection. In both cases, society’s most vulnerable — older, weaker people — are most at-risk.

The biggest study on heat and cold deaths, published in the journal Lancet, examined more than 74 million deaths from 384 locations in 13 countries. The research covers not only cold countries (such as Canada and Sweden), but also temperate countries (Spain, South Korea and Australia) and subtropical and tropical areas (Brazil, Taiwan and Thailand). The researchers found that heat can be blamed for almost one-half of 1 percent of all deaths. But more than 7 percent of all deaths are caused by the cold.

Globally, for every single heat-related death, 17 people die from cold. This varies from country to country. In the US, around 9,000 people died in 2015 because of the heat — but 191,000 deaths can be attributed to the cold.

Heat-wave deaths get outsized attention because they’re more media-friendly than cold deaths. Heat kills almost immediately, whereas the cold kills over weeks. The harsh truth is that a story about an elderly person slowly dying alone in an unheated apartment in winter simply doesn’t capture the media’s attention as much as the drama of a “killer” heat wave snatching a life.

We can look at the United Kingdom to see how the media favors one type of coverage over another. The heat wave this June sparked media coverage from every angle: melting roads, temperatures “hotter than Istanbul,” a warning on water use, tips on how to sleep in the heat, reporting on drowning victims and even on the heat wave’s effect on the giant hogweed plant (it grows more in the heat).

Compare this to more muted coverage in the winter two years ago, when around 43,000 “excess” deaths occurred in England and Wales. The British government finds that every winter, between 25,000 and 45,000 people die because of cold.

It’s fair to point out that as global warming increases temperatures, more heat waves will kill more people. Indeed, we have seen many headlines trumpeting this fact already this year. But it is almost universally forgotten that we’ll see fewer cold waves, and hence fewer cold deaths.

A study of the UK and Australia showed that heat-related deaths will increase but cold-related deaths will decrease by more. According to this study, in England and Wales today, the heat kills 1,500 people and the cold kills around 32,000.

In the 2080s, an increase in heat waves will mean nearly 5,000 deaths. But cold-related deaths will have dropped by 10,000, meaning 5,000 fewer deaths overall. A similar outcome for Australia will see 700 more heat deaths but 1,600 fewer cold deaths.

Some regions of the world — particularly Africa — will see heat deaths increase more than cold deaths decrease. But globally, it is estimated that 1.4 million fewer people will die by mid-century because of more heat waves and fewer cold waves.

Of course, global warming is still a problem we need to tackle, but for heat and cold deaths a simple temperature reduction might actually lead to more deaths. That’s why we need to focus on bringing people out of poverty — so they can provide either the heat or cold air they’re missing.



Bjorn Lomborg is director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center.