The Lancet’s Scientific Chicanery on Temperature-Related Deaths

climatechangedispatch.com

8 points·mutant_glofish··5 comments

I wonder _why_ they would do something like this? It seems so very self-defeating to give ammunition to those who want to toss out all climate science. Yes, it is entirely unfair that people will use this as evidence that the entire science behind climate change is doctored. But we _know_ people will use any stumble to push that narrative, so why not be incredibly cautious, and ensure that your science is above reproach?

This is stupid, like the rest of the articles on climatechangedispatch.com. The Lancet paper makes no attempt to say that heat-related deaths are worse than cold-related deaths. The paper is about the risk for temperature related death by age group in European cities, and the blog's version of the plot does not show that at all, removing the age groups entirely.

The age groups are not all that important, since the number of heat-related deaths is so small. It's fine to make a graph that shows both, but scaling the axis that way is at best incompetent.

> The age groups are not all that important

The age groups are the whole point of the paper. (Simply reading the abstract would have told the blogger or his readers that the paper is not at all about whether cold or heat causes more deaths.) It made the heat death bars longer just so the age groups could be shown, and the blogger's "corrected" plot doesn't show the information that the paper is about.

Written by a known disinformation "think tank": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CO2_Coalition

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