Climate Change Is ‘Killing People and Devastating Communities’ Says U.N. Chief António Guterres

24 Sep 2023

The United Nations alarmist-in-chief António Guterres called for “drastic steps” Friday to eliminate all fossil fuels in order to curb global warming.

“Climate change is not just a change in the weather. It is changing life on our planet,” Guterres asserted in a Twitter (X) post. “It is killing people and devastating communities.”

The U.N. chief did not share data on who exactly has died from “climate change” or which communities have been “devastated” by it, in accord with his usual practice of rhetoric-heavy, fact-light discourse.

Instead, he cut right to the chase: “To limit global temperature rise, we must phase out coal, oil & gas in a fair & equitable way – and massively boost renewables.”

In a video he embedded in his post, Guterres makes the remarkable claim that “every continent, every region, and every country is feeling the heat.”

That may be true in his native Portugal, but in Greenland, where the average yearly temperature is just over 1°F (-17°C), feeling the heat is a luxury.

Russia, spanning the continents of Asia and Europe, has a still colder annual average of -5.2ºF (-20.7ºC), meaning that below freezing is the norm.

Even in Canada, where the annual average sits at a balmy 20.6°F (-6.4°C), one supposes that an added 1.5ºC would be a welcome (if insufficient) change for the better.

One must assume that Mr. Guterres is also unaware that far more people die each year from cold weather than from heat.

A 2021 study published in the Lancet medical journal declared that 5,083,173 deaths were associated with “non-optimal temperatures per year,” but then went on to explain that the vast majority of these were “cold-related” rather than “heat-related.”

According to the Lancet, people around the world are 9.4 times more likely to die from the cold than from the heat. It added that over the past 20 years, the death rate from heat has slightly increased due to global warming (+0.21 percent), but that the death rate from the cold decreased more significantly still (-0.51 percent) during the same period.

An unbiased reader could reasonably infer that global warming has actually lowered the overall death rate from “non-optimal temperatures.”

Undeterred by the facts, Guterres went on to lament that not “all leaders are feeling that heat.”

“Actions are failing abysmally short. There is still time to keep rising temperatures within the 1.5 degree limits of the Paris Agreement,” he urged.

“But that requires drastic steps now to cut greenhouse gas emissions and to ensure climate justice for those who did least to cause the crisis but are paying the highest price,” he added.