Met Office Head’s Fake Heatwave Deaths Claim

Richard Betts, Head of Climate Impacts Research at the Met Office, was wheeled out on Channel 4 News yesterday to promote its dubious ‘hottest year evah in UK’ claim. His rather pathetic attempts to scare the public included ludicrous claims about plants and insects being confused and glaciers melting! Yes, Richard, glaciers have been melting for 200 years – were our SUVs the cause in 1800 as well?

But I cannot let him get away with one particularly outrageous claim, at about one minute in:

We had a run of three major heatwaves in the UK, which caused a lot of people to die sadly. Over 1,500 people died from heat related causes alone in the summer and about three-quarters of those probably would not have died without extra supercharging of the heatwave due to climate change.

There is absolutely no evidence to back any of this up. Similar claims in previous years have always originated from fraudulent computer models, completely disproven by the actual data.

The Office for National Statistics, ONS, carried out a full analysis after the 2022 heatwave, which found that the heatwave did not increase death rates at all. What it said was that deaths may have been brought forward by a few days on the hottest days, but quickly dipped below average on the days after. Over the period as a whole death rates were normal.

In short, people who were dying anyway may have died a couple of days or so prematurely. The heatwave did not kill them any more than an April shower or a cold winter’s day could have done.

I have been keeping tabs on this topic since the Guardian claimed in June that 600 would die from the heat that month. The table below is compiled from ONS weekly registration of deaths data. (Bear in mind that registration is around a week after the date of death.) As weekly registrations are affected by bank holidays, I have calculated averages per working day, i.e. excluding bank holidays.

There is a little blip upwards in Week 18 (week ending May 2nd), which almost certainly is a catching up of the backlog that built up over Easter, and also another blip up in Week 35, which included the August bank holiday – probably extra registrations crammed into the four-day week.

But the overall trend is unmistakeable. From winter onwards, there is a steady uninterrupted decline in daily deaths, until they resume their upward trend in autumn.

There is no sign at all of Betts’s fake “1,500 deaths” during the summer. On the contrary, as temperatures rose, deaths declined. To pretend otherwise is immoral and dishonest. In summer, many fewer die than in spring and autumn, never mind winter. Heat does not kill, Richard – cold does.

We are now very familiar with the politicisation of the Met Office. But this latest contribution from one of its most senior ‘scientists’ goes beyond the pale.

What Betts said was not only unsubstantiated and unscientific. It was an abuse of the trust that for years we have all put in the Met Office, which has for so long stood for scientific integrity, honesty and public service. It is a stain on the reputation of all those who once made the Met Office the envy of the world and a beacon of science.

If anybody needs any further convincing about this perversion of science, just listen to Richard Betts’s words. Twice he tells us we must give up fossil fuels.

Sorry, Richard, but it is not your job, or the Met Office’s, to tell us what we can and cannot do.

You have thoroughly demeaned your self and destroyed your reputation.

First published on Paul Homewood’s blog, Not a Lot of People Know That. Subscribe here.