Joe Biden’s plan to manage the coronavirus outbreak included a promise to “fight climate change as a driver of health threats” by rejoining the Paris climate treaty on day one of his administration. His proposal went on to state that “the link between climate change and health security is well-documented and will create a growing threat to Americans.”

The assessment that man-made global warming will lead to massive increases in mortality isn’t just stated by “Joe the walking gaffe machine,” but is asserted as fact by most agencies and groups that promote the so-called “consensus” opinion on catastrophic man-made global warming. The reliably unreliable U. S. National Climate Assessment stated that “heat is already the leading cause of weather-related deaths in the United States.”

Climate extremists, like those that created the National Climate Assessment, predict that heat waves and high temperatures related to global warming will kill increasingly more people worldwide. As usual, the inconvenient facts are otherwise. If the merchants of doom were right, the warming over the last 150 years should be reflected in more heat-related deaths.

The inconvenient fact is that cold kills considerably more people than heat. It is, by far, the biggest weather-related killer worldwide. Warmer weather would mean far fewer premature temperature-related deaths.

A study of temperature-associated mortality found that cold-related deaths in the U.K. and Australia accounted for 61 and 33 deaths per million, respectively, while heat-related deaths were only three and two per million. Cold kills more than 15 times as many people as heat in these countries.

In the largest study to date on deaths attributable to heat or cold, Gasparrini (2015) and a large team of collaborators from around the world examined more than 74 million deaths in 13 countries between 1985 and 2012. Warm countries included Thailand and Brazil; temperate countries included Australia; cold countries included Sweden. The aim was to determine the number of deaths attributable to either heat or cold.

The study revealed that cold weather kills 20 times as many people as heat. Worse, one in 15 deaths, from all causes, was attributable to cold. Only one death in 250 was attributable to heat. In every country examined, cold-related deaths greatly outnumbered deaths from heat.

By far the largest number of temperature-related deaths comes from moderate cold. Of course, moderate cold occurs far more frequently than extreme cold: but these figures show, and show clearly, that even a modest decrease in temperature is more likely to kill, while even a large increase is not.

According to research into summer heat-related deaths in the United States, these deaths declined dramatically in the last half of the 20th century and continue to fall. Between 1979 and 2006, United States annual death rates from heat declined by 10%, while deaths from cold fell by a dramatic 37%. In fact, extreme-weather deaths and death rates have decreased by 98% since the 1920s, notwithstanding the modest global warming since then.

The statistics tell us that temperature-related deaths are decreasing around the world and that the decline in cold-linked mortality is particularly dramatic. And that -- except in the world of climate extremism -- is a very good thing.

The facts starkly challenge the contention that warmer weather kills. The truth is that warmer weather has already cut temperature-related deaths, and will continue to do so, directly raising life expectancies around the world. The facts and the data demonstrate exactly the opposite of what the prognosticators of climate doom predict. If this important element of the alarmist campaign is so easily debunked by so many scientific studies, shouldn’t one also look with a critical eye at all the other hobgoblins of alarm?

At this point in time we don’t know how badly humanity will be impacted by the COVID-19 virus, but a recent study gives some hope for a savior in warming weather as winter gives way to spring and summer. According to the report, the family of coronaviruses “have been shown to display strong winter seasonality between December and April and are undetectable in summer months in temperate regions.” We shall see if that holds true for our current contagion.

Portions of this commentary were taken from Gregory Wrightstone’s bestselling book Inconvenient Facts – the science that Al Gore doesn’t want you to know.