An estimated 50,000 people died from heat-related causes across European cities this summer. Yet climate denial persists, driven not just by fossil-fuel interests but by political identity and manipulation.

The 50,000 heat-related deaths in Europe this northern summer far exceeded the previous high of 29,000 in 2022.

Noel Turnbull

A team of scientists, reporting in a Nature Health article (31/10) found that: “The summer of 2026 was characterised by a series of extreme heatwaves across Western Europe, with both monthly and annual temperature records broken repeatedly across many countries from May onwards."

They also found that several government agencies issued near-real-time estimates of the mortality associated with the most intense heat events, reflecting the severity of the threat to public health.

The researchers combined mortality relationships to estimate heat-related mortality in 854 European cities during the summer months (June–August) and compared it with counterfactual climate conditions representing a world without human-caused warming.

“We estimate 50,391 heat-related excess deaths across the 854 cities during the summer, with around two-thirds of these attributable to anthropogenic climate change. These results highlight the threat from human-caused warming and the need for rapid emissions reductions alongside preparation and adaptation measures," they said.

Meanwhile, Zeke Hausfather, writing in Carbon Brief, said: “We haven’t seen anything like this in the historical record and it may end up in the strongest El Niño in the past millennium.”

The Economist (6/11/26) reported that the governments of Bolivia, Panama and Peru have declared states of emergency. In the Indian state of Telangana, a lack of water led the government to ask farmers not to cultivate water-intensive rice this winter.

The UNEP Global GHG emissions Report finds that “decades of climate inaction makes exceedance of 1.5C unavoidable – whether it will be temporary crucially depends on decisions taken today.”

The Economist also writes that “What marks this El Niño out as a particular concern is that it is hitting a planet already forced well beyond the temperatures it is used to. It is also the largest such event yet seen.”

Yet despite all this, climate change denial is growing rather than shrinking. In Australia, One Nation, the Victorian Liberals – currently leading in the polls, and the national Liberal Party are all flouting their opposition to net zero.

Donald Trump sums it all up by saying climate change is a “hoax”.

To most rational observers and scientists this position seems incomprehensible. Yet the critical question is why this view is held by all these groups and individuals?

It is too simple to blame it all on propaganda from the major polluters although they have played a very big role in the promoting denial claims. Indeed, the scale of their operations is even greater than those the tobacco industry adopted to protect their industry despite the overwhelming evidence of the effects of tobacco.

The Marlboro Man ads were typical of the sort of ads designed to encourage smoking. The fact that the actor appearing in the ad died of lung cancer tended to be ignored by the industry.

Unlike the tobacco industry ads the marketing supporting fossil fuels focus more on the benefits the fuels bring – just avoiding the downsides of the global impacts.

There is also a plethora of takedowns and rebuttals of climate change denial. Nature (19/10) reports that investors have launched a deluge of public record requests since 2024 to US universities in a campaign to question climate attribution science – that is, some evil science which links fossil fuels to climate change.

Nature said: “The requests seem to be part of an expanding effort by groups with ties to the energy industry to discredit findings in the burgeoning field of climate attribution science, which estimates the extent to which extreme weather events such as floods and heatwaves are due to climate change.”

The evidence is as clear-cut as the evidence for smoking – it’s just that the costs to humanity are very much greater.

Another possibility is that climate change denial is a philosophical and political statement which is more about identity rather than logic. When Tony Abbott says climate change is crap, it is a manifestation of his pugilistic approach to things rather than any possible considered scientific opinion.

The Victorian Liberal Party, the National Liberals, the National Party along with Pauline Hanson, UK Tories and US Republicans, all share climate change denial as a badge of identity more than any serious consideration of the issue.

All of them are also cognisant of the attitude to potential donors from these sources.

Coincidentally, two philosophers – Avishai Margalit and Assaf Sharon – have published a new book Captive Minds – which is an inquiry into political manipulation and the threats it poses to human freedom.

The book’s blurb sums it up. “Public support is fundamental to the legitimacy of government. Today, political manipulation is corrupting the formation and expression of public opinion, making manipulation a driving force of the global crisis of democratic decline.”

https://johnmenadue.com/post/2026/11/europes-heat-deaths-soar-while-climate-denial-becomes-a-political-badge/

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