A deception perpetrated by The Lancet is another example of how once respected institutions of the scientific community are not above abandoning principle to advance the fearmongering of a planet warming to purportedly dangerous levels.

As reported in the CO2 Coalition’s online newsletter, The Lancet published a study showing that cold-related deaths account for 10 times the number of deaths due to heat – a comparison similar to other research findings about the relative danger of temperature extremes.

However, The Lancet pulled a sleight of hand when depicting the data in a chart to accentuate deaths due to heat and diminish those from cold.

The trickery of The Lancet’s Figure A is revealed by the CO2 Coalition’s revision in Figure B. Note that the X axis at the bottom in Figure A is in increments of 50 on the left (cold) side and in increments of 10 on the right (hot) side. This five-fold difference in scaling serves to exaggerate the number of deaths due to heat and minimize the cold-related deaths. This is technically correct, but intellectually wrong.