Heatwave Hysteria Strikes Again

Spring in Britain (or at least the parts of it I have visited) was one of the best I can remember. Farmers have complained about it being a bit dry (in contrast to recent years being extremely wet), but for the rest of us, the warm but mild temperatures and fresh conditions were welcome. Early summer has also brought us some exceptionally nice weather. But towards the end of last week, the heatwave began to intensify. And rather than allowing us to bask in the glorious rays of a flaming June, the miserabilists were mobilised to pour misery on our delight. What we were enjoying, claimed these green grinches, were portents of doom. People were going to be killed by it. But this echo of Greta’s I-want-you-to-panic catechism lacks objective, scientific foundation.

The first and most ridiculous of this species of claim was that produced by the go-to outfit for every obedient climate journalist, the World Weather Attribution (WWA) group, largely based out of Imperial College (of dodgy Covid mortality projections fame, using very similar methods). ‘Deadly weekend heat in England “100 times more likely” due to climate crisis,’ proclaimed the Guardian’s Environment Editor Damian Carrington, following the WWA’s analysis. But ‘attribution’ of weather events to anthropogenic climate change is profoundly unsafe, and indeed, unscientific. It is a media stunt, intended to drive commentary, not reveal knowledge about weather.

‘Attribution’ owes very little to objectivity and fact. Rather than basing estimates of the influence of a warmer planet on observational evidence, researchers like those at the WWA instead compare the outputs of computer simulations with different starting points for atmospheric CO₂ concentrations. The “100 times more likely” claim emerges from the comparison of the outputs produced by the two simulations. This is unscientific, because simulations are not the real world; the simulations include all of the assumptions that ideologically-motivated researchers programme into them. Ideology in, ideology out. Actual science requires a comparison of a hypothesis’s claims against evidence obtained by observational evidence – experiment. WWA is consequently little more than a machine for producing BBC and Guardian propaganda articles.

A similar enterprise has been developed by researchers at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM). On Saturday, LSHTM published a press release, widely cited by the fake news media that claimed: ‘Nearly 600 heat-related deaths expected in UK heatwave, researchers estimate.’ According to the statement, “Real-time rapid analysis reveals impact of rising UK temperatures.” But that’s false, in any event. There have always been heatwaves. And as I pointed out last year on the Daily Sceptic, not only do the summer months bring lower rates of death, the historical trend shows that so-called ‘excess summer deaths’ (the number of deaths above the average for that week of the year) have fallen dramatically over the last century.

In the 1911 heatwave, for example 3,228 people died in London alone. The impacts of weather, climate and heatwaves are diminishing, no matter whether or not the underlying meteorological data exhibit any change, and whether or not any part of that change can be attributed to any cause. LSHTM has decided, for no good reasons, to abuse its status as a research centre, to provide a morbid, ahistorical and unscientific commentary in support of political narratives.

The need and desire for such data to convince the public that their interests lie in radical and expensive emissions-reduction policies and in green politics more broadly, has created a market for climate chancers of all kinds. But the task of producing an official version of the relationship between heatwaves and deaths falls to the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA). Though this fails to provide running commentary of the number of deaths per day, thereby failing to keep people terrified of sunshine, it does attempt to compile retrospective statistics of the kind that we became used to during the Covid debacle.

According to the HSA’s ‘Heat mortality monitoring report, England: 2024‘, last year four main heatwave events claimed the lives of 428 people aged 75 to 84, and 753 people aged 85 or over. That may sound like a lot, but here’s what it looks like, when seen in the context of total numbers of daily deaths.

It does appear that heatwaves drive a small increase in daily deaths. But it also seems clear that although temperatures increase into the summer months, heatwaves of the same (or greater) magnitude do not have an increasing effect. The UKHSA estimate of heatwave-related mortality might therefore better be explained by data-torturing than by real-world effects. So who is really being killed by heatwaves, and what else might explain these deaths? And what are these deaths, in reality?

According to the UKHSA’s data, 4,087 life years were lost from the 75-84 cohort, and 2,844 life years lost from the 85-plus age group. These would indeed seem to be tragedies, amounting to premature deaths of 9.6 years each in the younger group, and 3.8 years in the older. These are significant lengths of time that cannot be ruled out callously. If they are correct, these statistics represent time spent in enjoyment at the end of long lives, with families, grandchildren and new great grandchildren. Life is worth living, despite MPs’ claims to the contrary.

But there are very strong indications that deaths attributed to heatwaves from these cohorts are not from individuals that have these futures. The HSA’s data is not sufficient to examine the detail for either group, but it is clear enough to establish that 496 of those deaths occurred in care homes and 473 in hospitals. Just 358 died in their own homes. And they died with significant comorbidities. Some 440 (37%) had circulatory diseases, 201 (17%) had cancer, 78 (7%) had chronic respiratory diseases, 229 (19%) had dementia or Alzheimer’s, 79 (7%) had influenza or pneumonia and 268 (23%) had a comorbidity described as ‘other’. Though any of those individuals may have had one or more of those comorbidities, it is clear that heatwaves are a mortality risk mainly to the very frail.

Heatwaves – whether or not the result of ‘anthropogenic global warming’ – are not striking down normal, healthy young people with decades of life in front of them. And indeed, objective commentary observes that a heatwave only brings forward deaths by a few days, right at the very end of life. Rapid responses are silly interventions offered by individuals and organisations that are taking on political roles, not seeking to inform public debate with objective fact and reasoning.

But what about the weather itself? What actually happened? As sure as eggs is eggs, it is the Met Office who will mislead the public with dodgy readings from thermometers at dubious locations. “With temperatures at Charlwood in Surrey having reached 33.2°C this afternoon, today provisionally marks the warmest day of 2025 so far,” tweeted the Met Office.

The problem with that is, as all who track these stories know well, these seemingly record-breaking thermometer readings come from weather stations sited at airports. Charlwood is no exception, being sat about a kilometre from Gatwick Airport’s runway. The Charlwood weather station is depicted below by a small red dot.

There are seven square miles of tarmac and concrete directly to the east of the Charlwood weather station. These substances absorb energy from the sun and re-emit heat far more readily than air, such that when air temperatures are in the order of 30°C, the runways, hardstanding and buildings will be in the order of 50°C. And these in turn heat the air. Moreover, of course, Gatwick sees about a flight a minute either arriving or departing from its runway at busy times – hot jets blasting the air in all directions.

I pointed this out on X, to much green annoyance. I was stupid to suggest that jets could blast hot air an entire kilometre away, whinged the chorus. False. At take off, air being pushed out of jets reaches far, with 1,900 feet (579 metres) behind the engine being classified as a hazardous area. Air, from the jet itself, and rising from the hot runway tarmac, can be moved from the airport to nearly all the way to the weather station in the blink of an eye.

And it was ridiculous to claim that the ‘Urban Heat Island’ (UHI) effect of higher temperatures could influence the station, claimed the same whinges, because most of the distance between the runway and the weather station was ‘rural’ — pasture. But this too is false. Warm air is not like some kind of vampire, unable to cross the boundary of a home it is not invited into. True, rural landscape in general does help to dissipate heat. But this is not the case where conditions are very dry (as they were) and sparse grassland.

Moreover, UHI effects can travel very far distances indeed. A 2018 study of UHI published in in the journal of Climate and Atmospheric Science  found “significant heating 100-200 m above the surface and 70 km downwind” of Chicago. A 2017 study in Britain, although concerned more with night-time temperatures, found that even a relatively small site of just 1 km square could influence temperatures half a kilometre away by 0.5°C.

To add to the problems of the weather stations categorisation of ‘rural’, to the southeast of Charlwood is the sprawling city of Crawley. And here, the population has increased by 11% since 2011, to 118, 500 people. Growing populations, increasingly busy airports and more powerful jet engine designs: it might be the case that the Met Office’s thermometers are better at measuring development than temperature.

It’s not wholly accidental, nor even deliberate, that the weather stations the Met Office uses to underscore its climate change narrative are frequently located at airports. There are weather stations at all airports in order to assist pilots’ navigation, and the Met Office was charged with producing reports for aviators for good reasons in more sober and enlightened times – when flying was seen as a Good Thing. But ideological mission creep now seems to have made enemies of aviation and its service personnel.

So it is of course far more likely for a weather station to be at an airport than somewhere else. But it is also far more likely for a weather station near an airport to be warmer than anywhere else, because of that airport’s construction – especially in a heatwave. And it is more likely that the area surrounding an airport will have seen rapid and extensive development that further adds to its UHI effect. This makes using temperature data from these sites for any other reason than aviation all the more problematic. They may not be suitable as weather monitors at all, and, given the nature of development, they may be even less useful as instruments to measure the effect of climate change. Failing to acknowledge it is like the ‘climate scientist’ noticing, but doing nothing about, his colleague’s thumb on the scales.