Your correspondent arrived back into Ireland yesterday, having spent most of the past three weeks travelling, to be greeted by further tidings of climactic doom thundering from the national broadcaster:
The data shows that between 2015 and 2019 emergency hospital admissions for temperature-affected diseases were 8.5% higher on hot days in Ireland.
The ESRI combined temperature data from Met Éireann with emergency inpatient hospitalisation data, showing that temperature rises significantly increase hospitalisations in Ireland for temperature-related health conditions.
Hot days were defined as 22C to 25C compared to moderate temperature days of 10C to 13C….
….It pointed out that evidence in the literature estimates that under the most pessimistic climate scenario, climate change could lead to 1,400 additional deaths a year in Ireland by the end of the 21st century.
I spent most of the past three weeks, incidentally, in Madeira, where daily temperatures averaged about 26 degrees, and in Ukraine, where they averaged about 32 degrees. The temperature in Dublin Airport when we landed yesterday morning was….. 12 degrees.
Now, those facts are anecdotal. The simple fact that I spent several weeks luxuriating in warmer temperatures without need of hospitalisation does not, in and of itself, disprove the data from the ESRI showing that warmer days in Ireland have resulted, in recent years, in a higher level of hospitalisations.
The difficulty here is not the data, but, as ever, RTE’s incuriosity about the data. The increased hospitalisations on warm days can only be attributed to Climate Change, you see, and not to any one of about a half-dozen other explanations. The report is accompanied by the mandatory dire warning that, in stark contrast to the famous UK Labour Party anthem, things can only get worse and that by 2100 we’ll have two thousand people cooking to death annually.
But of course, there are obvious, non-climate reasons why hospitalisations might increase when the weather is sort of half-passable in Ireland. The most obvious of these is simply that people engage in riskier activities when the weather is good: Irish people, being as un-used to the sun as they are, tend to go a little bit mad when the orange ball in the sky comes out, and afflict themselves with sunstroke in a way no self-respecting Spaniard ever would. Farmers take advantage of warm weather to engage in machinery-intensive farming activities like silage harvesting and manure spreading, which carry significantly greater risks of injury than an average day on the farm does. People go swimming in the sea and get themselves into trouble. Indeed, in recent years, researchers in the USA, China, Spain, France and Iran have discovered that good weather meaningfully increases the risk of road accidents.
That these risk factors associated with warm weather might create a hospitalisation differential between warm days and cooler days is relatively obvious. What’s more, it should be reasonably obvious that in a country with as relatively few warm days as Ireland experiences, these differences would be heightened, as people cram their risky activities into a relatively small number of days on the calendar.
In fact, one would intuitively expect that an increase in the overall number of warm days would significantly reduce, rather than increase, the lethality we apparently experience when the sun comes out. That is because, as my recent excursions tend to demonstrate, human beings are adaptable. My Ukrainian hosts, over the last week, were barely remarking on the weather at all, continuing with life in conditions that, were they replicated in Ireland, would be the sole topic of national conversation. We might reasonably expect that were Ireland to suddenly start experiencing a mediterranean climate during the summer, the result would not be thousands of deaths but rather Irish people becoming more used to the heat and more able to cope with it without walking around shirtless as soon as the mercury crosses 18 degrees.
My new, and wonderful colleague, Laura Perrins, often writes about something she calls “the message”. That is to say, the way in which the Irish media (and western media in general) feels the need to infuse every news report with a morality tale reinforcing the basic precepts of the progressive worldview: A story about violence against women will be presented with comments about the inherent violence of masculinity. A story about minority election candidates must always include references to racism. Any story about the weather must always include either a hint (or in this case a direct link) to climate change alarmism. This story is a perfect example of that in action.
RTE, for whatever reason, appears to believe that one of its core duties as a national broadcaster is to advance “the message” on climate change at every available opportunity: Thus, every single marginally noteworthy shift in our weather patterns from week to week is explicitly connected to climate change. Flooding? Climate Change. Wind? Climate Change. Sun? Climate Change. Very little of this has any basis in science. As yesterday’s ludicrous article proves.