Image by Alana Jordan from Pixabay
By Jo Nova
A Climate Oracle hath spoken and the ABC soaked it all up, no questions asked
In research believed to be “the first of its kind” badly trained scientists have gone where no respectable scientist dared to go. They have “attributed” some deaths that haven’t happened to a specific fossil fuel project.
This opens the door (they think) to a legal bonanza.
Modelling shows gas project emissions will cause hundreds of heat-related deaths
By Jo Lauder, ABC
Australian researchers have linked a single fossil fuel project to climate impacts, modelling that Woodside’s Scarborough project will cause 484 heat-related deaths in Europe.
It is the first time a scientific paper has attributed the climate impacts of a specific fossil fuel project.
It also found that the incremental rise in global temperatures from that one project would result in an additional 16 million corals lost in every bleaching event on the Great Barrier Reef, and expose an extra 516,000 people around the world to unprecedented heat.
This study is a scientific wasteland of unverified, unskilled models that fail on humidity, rainfall, sea ice, storms, droughts, floods, upper tropospheric temperatures, ocean cycles, feedbacks, and global temperature trends now and in the past. They also fail in everything about Antarctica and most of the major past climatic events. That aside, their interpretation is biased, incomplete and incompetent.
The whole 30 year Scarborough project will only warm the world 0.00039 degrees
Even according to their exaggerating skillless models, the entire effect of Scarborough emissions will supposedly raise global temperatures by all of four ten-thousandths of a degree. Frankly, this analysis will have the exact opposite effect the researchers hope. It’s going to reassure Australians that it would be crazy to stop this project going ahead.
In the new paper published in the Nature journal Climate Action, researchers found Scarborough’s 880 million tonnes of emissions over its lifetime — including emissions when the gas was burnt — would increase global temperatures by 0.00039 degrees.
If only it had been peer reviewed by a respectable journal, the editors would have sent them packing…
Firstly, if emissions could warm the world, it would save lives. Death rates from the cold, swamp any paltry losses to heat theoretically imagined in 50 years time. Cold weather is not just 10% more deadly, it’s 600%, 1000% or 2000% more likely to kill. Any reduction in cold weather will save lives. Plus heatwaves tend to kill people who were going to die in the next six weeks anyway.
Secondly, cheaper gas saves lives immediately, (what’s the discount rate on a theoretical death in 2100?). Gas heats homes, fertilizes food, cooks food, and makes cheap clothing. If Scarborough was not approved, all these things would be slightly more expensive, thus hurting the poorest of the poor.
Thirdly, if Scarborough were shut down the gas would just be dug up somewhere else. Most countries are not banning gas exploration or extraction, and are not adopting suicidal taxes in a quest to change the weather. The authors don’t even consider this “leakage of carbon emissions” which is an industry standard in this sort of analysis.
Image by Noah Newbauer from Pixabay
The Scarborough Gas project will save so many lives, it would be a crime to stop it
The researchers claim they took the beneficial effects of warming into account and say magically “The increase in temperatures would result in fewer cold deaths in some parts of Europe, but even accounting for those deaths, the study estimates that 118 more people would die in Europe overall.”
So the 484 deaths in the headline is really 118 extra deaths even in their own paper. Are they here to serve Australians or deceive them?
Cold weather kills 6, 10, or 20 times as many people
Global warming saves 166,000 lives a year. (Zhao et al). Studies of 74 million people show the same pattern all over the world; in terms of the climate nothing is more deadly to humans than winter. (See Gasparrini et al). For every summer heat wave death, at least 6, 10 or even 20 people die due to cold weather in winter.
The largest study across 13 countries found cold deaths were twenty times more common than heat deaths. In richer European cities, with gas stoves and coal fired power stations *only* ten times as many people will die of the cold. (Mazzelot et al) Even in warm sunny Brisbane, Australia, six times as many people die in mild cold weather as in the heat of summer. (Cheng et al).
Abram et al (this new paper) uses the Gasparrini data set, but extrapolated far outside what it was intended for.
a/ The new modeling assumes the warming-death trend is linear even down to fractional tiny increments of a degree which is “brave” given that daily temperatures vary in any given city by 20,000 times as much.
b/ They assume that only temperature matters and ignore changes in wealth, unemployment, or healthcare.
c/ They assume if Scarborough was shut down the emissions are not just emitted elsewhere, which they almost certainly will be.
If climate modelers were paid to show windmills and solar panels kill people, it would be easy
If the Greens think they can stop projects with “attribution lawfare” they could get a nasty surprise. Once the doors are open on this scientific swamp of dubious extrapolation, the crocodiles will eat their own favourite projects alive.
We all know that modelers can find any answer they want if they have enough free parameters to toss their salad with.
Obviously, when it comes to deaths due to unreliable energy and higher electricity costs modelers have plenty of gears to turn. Senior citizens and the poor will die in cold rooms they can’t afford to heat. Food prices will rise, so families will run out of money to pay for healthy food and have to feed the kids cheezels for breakfast. Et Voila, there is obesity and diabetes to add to the funeral pyres. Sooner or later, a proper blackout will kill people on operating tables and in train tunnels. As electricity prices rise, businesses and factories will fail, so jobs will be lost, which raises suicide rates, homelessness, poverty and divorce.
And of course, there’s always the big one, that nations with no industrial strength are sitting ducks for foreign invasion and takeover. Could unreliable energy and pagan quests to control the weather with electrical generators break a civilization? Don’t get me started. You want mortality?
Someone could ask Lee Zeldin, Administrator of the US EPA, if he could fund that modeling?
REFERENCES
Abram, N.J., Maher, N., Perkins-Kirkpatrick, S. et al. Quantifying the regional to global climate impacts of individual fossil fuel projects to inform decision-making. npj Clim. Action 4, 92 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44168-025-00296-5
Cheng et al (2019) Impacts of heat, cold, and temperature variability on mortality in Australia, 2000–2009, Science of The Total Environment,Volume 651, Part 2, 15 February 2019, Pages 2558-2565, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2018.10.186
Masselot et al (2023) Excess mortality attributed to heat and cold: a health impact assessment study in 854 cities in Europe, The Lancet, DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/S2542-5196(23)00023-2
Gasparrini et al. (2015) Mortality risk attributable to high and low ambient temperature: a multicountry observational study. The Lancet, May 2015 DOI: 10.1016/S0140-6736(14)62114-0. Full PDF.
Holy cow, 400 deaths in Europe over the lifetime of the gas project!
Someone should point the researchers at Europe’s death statistics where it looks like an annual average rate of over 90,000 deaths *per* *week*.
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It’s a shame that the predicted 400 plus deaths in Europe are not the ‘Pollies’ and Climate Alarmists. If so, please predict many thousands of deaths for those people.
Now, that is cooking with gas.
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The true believers and those with $$$ invested in the global warming scam will lap this up as yet more proof that the end is nigh.
This modelling is right up there with “the oceans are boiling”.
Have they never heard of the boy who cried wolf?
No wonder that more and more people are tuning out from all the scaremongering.
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When will we see an end to these BS merchants and liars?
About 80% of the total energy to run the world comes from fossil fuels and today we live in the safest period in Human history.
Why can’t they go to OWI Data and spend a lousy few minutes and check the data for themselves and then hopefully wake up?
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Here’s all the deaths from extreme weather, droughts floods , extreme temps, wildfires, storms etc and deaths have plummeted by over 99% in the last 60 years.
And over 5 billion more people at risk today? A child of 5 should be able to understand this, so why can’t the so called scientists?
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/natural-disaster-death-rates?country=Drought~Extreme+temperature~Extreme+weather~Flood~Wildfire
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Excellent Neville,
I note only that the death rates are numbers per 100,000 so the increase in world population is taken into account.
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Interesting Neville. I note that Extreme Temperature does not distinguish between cold and heat. Nevertheless, it only shows 0.01 death per 100,000. That is one per 10 million. So, six tenths of two fifths of nothing!
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Indeed, let the Greens attempt “attribution lawfare”. It would only take one good lawyer and one sensible judge to demonstrate that all of this type of modelling is spurious. One decent precedent could get the house of cards to topple.
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one sensible judge. WE could have a problem.
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” It would only take one good lawyer and one sensible judge”
Aye, but there’s the rub, as Wishbone Ash might say.
https://musicotherapia.blogspot.com/2010/10/wishbone-ash-theres-rub-1974.html
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I’m speechless.
https://www.abc.net.au/listen/jo-lauder/10058626
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With a Bachelor of Journalism from the University of Wollongong, she has established herself as a prominent voice in environmental reporting.
Jo’s ability to translate scientific and policy-heavy content into relatable narratives has earned her recognition as a leader in climate-focused media.
Would not a science degree have been more meaningful in translating scientific content than a degree in Journalism?
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” Who’s gonna save us”…………… from what. ??
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An ABC journo, gods sake.
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So she’s basically a leftist spinmeister.
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It should also be noted that to get accepted to study a Bachelor of Journalism at Wollongong you don’t even need to get a Tertiary Entrance Ranking of 50.
In other words, you can fail HSC and still get accepted.
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In any arena other than ‘Climate Change’, this sort of insanity would bring about an immediate cancellation of those writing the prediction.
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Think of the lives that are saved every day in hospitals by all the plastics that are used in operating theatres and hospital wards – plastic that derives from gas and oil. Many of our drugs and pharmaceuticals have a plastic base as do the gloves, syringes,tubing, saline bags,bandages and the vast numbers of other items in healthcare.
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The lipstick she is wearing comes from a petroleum base and I guess much of her clothing, made and shipped here from overseas. The sun glasses she would wear on the Barrier Reef and Pacific islands. How did she go to all the places in the Pacific, not by row boat. The hypocrisy is quite sickening.
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That is laughable. Sorry I have to go full on ad hominem, Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick, a professor of climate science at ANU, is a complete spud. How can they produce such rubbish with a straight face? Sounds like she would be a better suited as a Teals candidate, not a real science practitioner.
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Climate scientist Dr Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick is one scientist you won’t find in a lab: “Pipettes are not my thing!”
As part of her PhD in Climate Science at UNSW Sydney, Sarah examined how well climate models provided projections of climate extremes over Australia, including heatwaves.
Sarah spent two years at CSIRO’s Marine and Atmospheric Research division, where she worked for the Pacific Climate Change Science Program.
She used her skills to assess how the Pacific Islands could be affected by climate change in the future and the risks the local population faces.
Sarah also visited the Pacific Islands to engage with the local community, spending time in Samoa, Fiji and the Cook Islands. I think visits to the Carribean and the Riviera will be next to engage with the local communities.
You have to wonder how people are coping in Samoa, Fiji, the Cook islands and FNQ on the Barrier Reef. Who needs pipettes when you can visit the disaster areas yourself?
Much more sensible than being stuck in a frozen laboratory studying ice cores.
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Oh gawd. That cheers me up no end, NOT.
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Any “research” in climate “science” is a wonderful way to get taxpayer funded adventure holidays to exotic locations.
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Why are we so safe today and do we ignore some of the obvious data before our eyes?
Average life expectancy today is about 25 years higher than 1950 (pop 2.5 billion) and about 46 years higher than 1800 and again life expectancy in 1900 was only about 32 years and population in 1900 was just 1.6 billion.
https://www.worldometers.info/demographics/life-expectancy/
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And that’s if you survived being born.
How many died at childbirth in ‘The Good Old Days’? And how many die today?
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There’s that infallible word again: “modelling.”
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People get government money to create this carp. A good example of why less government is better.
The “paper” comes from the Sh^t Hole that is Canberra. And the “journalist” is paid for by their ABC which is funded from the Sh^t Hole.
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How utterly depressing. We are now living in an era of the collapse of civilization. Never before has there been such a crime against humanity as the climate scam followed by the Covid scam all organized be a group of plutocrats aiming to take over the World and turn us all into serfs, that is, those that live to provide services to the rich and infamous. Do they really think that China will accept their dominance?
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Lomborg also quotes Dr Nordhaus (Nobel Prize winner for Economics) and concludes that the average person in 2100 will be 4.34 times richer than we are today and could be another 0.16 times richer if we WASTE hundreds of TRILLIONs of $ on their so called dangerous CC.
Here’s his quote……..
“The latest UN Climate Panel scenarios indicate that the average person will be 4.5 times richer by the end of the century than now”.
“Climate change will merely slow progress, such that the average person will be “only” 4.34 times as rich — by no means the end of the world. Yet fear pushes many to demand an inefficient diversion of hundreds of trillions of dollars to steer the global economy abruptly towards zero carbon emissions”.
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BTW here’s the link to the Lomborg article.
Does anyone really think that the last 0.16 is worth the trillions of $ of waste starting today?
https://www.businesslive.co.za/bd/opinion/2023-11-06-bjorn-lomborg-and-jordan-b-peterson-the-world-is-better-off-than-you-think/
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We might be 4.34 times richer, but things will cost at least 5 times more.
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The UN projections for 2100 show average Human life expectancy to be much higher than today and here’s the continents listed from OWI Data.
Aussies are the highest life expectancy, but lower when shown as Oceania.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/future-life-expectancy-projections?tab=line&country=OWID_WRL~UNM49_ASI~UNM49_AFR~UNM49_EUR~UNM49_OCE~UNM49_NAM~UNM49_LAC~AUS
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As a matter of interest, has anybody fed one of these more ludicrous articles or papers through one of the AI programs?
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They should all be fed through a shredder.
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And used to light your fireplace.
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The AI programs are probably trained on such stuff.
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Indeed. And feeding the more ludicrous papers through AI software trained on ludicrous papers may be very revealing.
In fact feeding ludicrous papers through AI software may be a very real gotcha!
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They have.
The scientific AIs that they’ve been fed to are in essence calling them garbage.
ChatGP, on the other hand, is a beta test social AI that is not fit for any purpose, a typical Microsoft real world beta test product.
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The UN expects about 10.1 billion by 2100 and 8.4 billion of that will come from Africa and Asia.
In fact Asia has a projection of over 5 billion well before 2100 but that is expected to be lower by the end of the century.
In fact I can’t find their CC at all and everyone will be much healthier and wealthier by 2100.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/population-with-un-projections?country=OWID_WRL~AUS~UNM49_ASI~UNM49_AFR~UNM49_EUR~UNM49_NAM~UNM49_LAC
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The woke world is imploding as Trump struts the world stage with people fawning over him and wanting an audience with him. I see the respect his cabinet has for him and how he shares the glory of their combined efforts.
The climate doom mongers are so blinded and enraged by TDS that they are now inventing the silliest doom stories for fear of Trump being proven right about the climate scam.
Here is this “climate journalist” who has spent her short life being indoctrinated into climate doom and now making a living out of it without having a clue about the physical world.
I wonder what she will be doing with her life by 2050. Whether she will reflect on writing such nonsense and how incompetent Canberra and her employer really are.
One of the things that gets me out of bed each day is the prospect of hammering another nail into the coffin of the climate doomers. Looking forward to a world unbridled by their stupidity. Not sure I will live to see that. I have faith in Trump making it through his term and handing over to someone of similar energy and values.
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ABC. Climate. Journalist. Got it all going on there.
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Think of that Scarborough gas as enabling their erratic, unreliable, ugly looking, farmland hogging, hail intolerant and lightning attracting occasional energy systems.
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Meanwhile…
From Marco Rubio, 16th Oct 2025:
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..”Under the leadership of @POTUS, the U.S. will be a hard NO. We call on other nations to stand alongside
the United States in defence of our citizens and sovereignty.”
Fight,fight,fight the UN BureauKracy fear and guilt tax!
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Hi Jo,
Very well found.
I suggest that the authors of this paper should be careful of what they wish for.
The following statement has no need of modelling, it is a fact, pure and simple.
The blackout that affected the entire Iberian Peninsula on 28 April last, throwing the entire region into absolute chaos was directly responsible for the deaths of 10 people.
My point is that this disaster was triggered by the cascading failure of several solar farms.
That is fact. It is not a finding of some questionable modelling.
The hard part for our authors of this paper is that if gas turbine generation – lots of it – had not been available to help to restore power, many more people might have died.
Perhaps this might help to put this nonsense paper into perspective. Also, if the authors had conducted a careful examination of the evidence down the years of deaths due to wind turbines, they might be forced to conclude that using gas-fired generation, from a mortality perspective, isn’t such a bad thing after all.
Try to run the world on renewables alone, as the Spanish authorities attempted, and many more people will die during the inevitable, frequent, blackouts.
Cheers,
Paul Miskelly
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Cold weather kills n times as many people …
They may as well say that as one person dies for every … let’s say 100 hospitals being built, then no hospitals should be built because there are some deaths associated with some builds.
The same argument would see everyone out of a job, out of their house and we couldn’t possibly allow anyone to have those dangerous things called food and … water!!! One of the most dangerous substances on earth by the number who are killed by water.
Problem solved: if we returned to a life of scavenging for worms in the heat of the African planes, then not a single person will be killed by modern technology. And we’ll all die a very “happy” and short natural life of starvation, disease and predation … and we might kill a few Africans as well … as they die from laughter at the antics of the incredulous naked Europeans.
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The project proposal and acceptance report from the national offshore regulator can be found via the link below. No doubt the other oil & gas projects in the list will face similar garbage science rebuttals.
The proposal is 800pages long, and there are appendices. Good if you have trouble sleeping!
Scarborough Development (OPP #4765)
https://www.nopsema.gov.au/offshore-industry/environmental-management/assessment-process/public-comment
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https://consultation.nopsema.gov.au
for public consultation…
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Meanwhile, back in the good ole sensible UK:
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2025/10/16/bbc-worried-about-rosebank-emissions/
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For the record, it is 50 years since I accompanied Ken Richards, then Exploration Manager for Esso in Australia to ask our masters, Exxon in New York for permission and funds to drill a well into the Exmouth Plateau. Little did we know …
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If they established that the project would only cause a rise of a fraction of a degree do they actually explain how these people will die.? Do they just assume that readers of the paper would be complete idiots.
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