A Myth of Ice and Fire

For Throwback Wednesday, cold kills more -- sorry, AP

It’s hot where I am, and I suspect it’s hot where you are.

Mercifully, the end of meteorological summer is just a few weeks away. But as annoying as high temperatures and brutal humidity can be, in terms of danger, cold is the bigger killer.

I wrote the piece below back in 2022, when I was part of a doomed-to-fail attempt to fuse an Albuquerque radio station with a think tank.

Enjoy!

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Hot enough for ya?

New Mexico narrowly escaped the worst of the worst of this weekend’s scorcher, but records were matched or broken from Sin City to Denver, Phoenix to Dallas-Fort Worth.

As the heat wave approached, the Associated Press helpfully warned of what was to come. But the MSM outlet couldn’t resist singing from the climate-hysteria chorus. Midday Thursday, “reporter” Felicia Fonseca — she’s “on AP’s Race & Ethnicity Team” — sermonized: “Excessive heat causes more deaths in the U.S. than other weather-related disasters, including hurricanes, floods and tornadoes combined.”

Um … okay. But how is that relevant? The opposite of excessive heat is not “hurricanes, floods and tornadoes” — it’s excessive cold. And when one explores the data, it quickly becomes clear that deep freezes pose much more of a danger to humans than soaring temperatures.