According to Jesuit Father Thomas Reese, anyone who rejects the climate issue “is so deep in denial that they would not flee a burning house if their clothes were on fire.”
Despite the fact that a rising number of famous scientists doubt the existence of a so-called “climate emergency,” Father Reese believes that a hot July should persuade any sensible person of the truth behind climate alarmism.
“We are like frogs in a pot of water being slowly cooked as the temperature rises,” the priest writes. “We don’t have the sense to get out of the pot, let alone turn off the heat.”
In his article, Father Reese makes the incredible claim that globally, “5 million people a year die from the heat.”
One hopes Father Reese is better at administering the sacraments than doing research, since the study he references to back up that statement makes no such claim.
The 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.
Undeterred, Father Reese goes on to rail against air conditioning before lamenting the “billions of dollars in damage” caused by flooding, which he believes is related to global warming.
What the priest fails to mention is that global deaths from weather-related incidents have been steadily decreasing year by year and are now a tiny fraction of what they were a century ago, in part due to better heating and — yes — air conditioning.