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.