The Guardian has churned out yet another piece of climate exaggeration, this time claiming that storms, floods, and wildfires in 2024 “affected” over 400,000 people in Europe.
.png)
Do they even grasp how this can be ripped to shreds?
Let’s break it down. Europe’s population is roughly 500 million. If 400,000 were “affected,” that leaves 499,600,000 who were not. The “affected” are a mere 0.08% of the population. What does “affected” even mean here? The article doesn’t specify the severity—were these people displaced, inconvenienced, or just vaguely aware of a storm? Compare that to, say, the adverse effects of COVID vaccines. I won’t dive into those stats, but in my book, The Weaponization of Weather in the Phony Climate War (written in April 2020), I dedicated two chapters to exposing how media outlets like this rely on distortion, deception, and their own delusional narratives to push agendas.
The ignorance on display is staggering, matched only by the arrogance of assuming no one would notice the absurdity. If 0.08% of a population is “affected,” that’s practically nobody relative to the whole. It’s a minuscule figure, yet they present it as a crisis. The word “affected” is deliberately vague, a classic tactic of manipulation. On April 15, a thunderstorm in State College, Pennsylvania knocked over some trash cans in my neighborhood. By their logic, that “affected” people. Should we start counting every minor inconvenience to inflate these numbers? Sure, some may have faced serious impacts, but how many just dealt with a few hours of flooded roads? To write a piece like this, with Europe’s growing population, and not expect it to be dismantled for its flimsiness, reveals a worldview utterly detached from critical thinking.
Now, let’s have some fun with their logic. CO2 makes up 0.042% of the atmosphere. What fraction of that 0.042% caused this 0.08% to be “affected”? If we play their game of cherry-picking numbers, multiply 0.042% by 0.08%, and you get 0.0000034%. Apply that to 500 million people, and you’re left with 168 people “affected” by CO2-driven climate events. Why not? It’s no more absurd than writing an article like this without context or using slippery terms like “affected” that could mean anything from a flooded basement to a fallen tree branch. It’s the same nonsense as “climate anxiety”—a kid’s baseball game gets rained out, someone whispers “climate change,” and suddenly he’s got an existential crisis. I used to have that kind of anxiety too, worrying storms wouldn’t live up to my forecasts.
Here’s the reality: the global population is four times what it was in 1930, yet weather and climate related deaths are 1/28th what they were then. That’s the real picture, worth far more than The Guardian’s thousand words of hyperbole.
.jpg)
Writing like this is as laughable as claiming you’re a better bowler because you knocked down one pin in a 30-pin game. Actually, no—that’s too generous. With numbers this weak, they’re not even hitting the pins. They’re straight in the gutter, which is where this kind of logic belongs.