The death toll from last week’s tornadoes in Kentucky is around 74, Gov. Andy Beshear said Monday, but it could climb higher as more than 100 people are still unaccounted for. 

As is often the case when a natural disaster hits, opportunistic climate activists use the event to scare people about the impacts of climate change, even when there’s little evidence of the event having been caused by global warming.

Among those sounding alarms in the wake of last week’s Midwest tornadoes was American climatologist and geophysicist Michael Mann. On Democracy Now, Mann referenced the tornado destruction and claimed that wildfires, heat waves, droughts, floods and coastal inundation caused by climate change have killed more people than COVID-19. 

Mann fancies himself a bastion of science in a sea of science denial, so it was surprising to hear him make such a completely unscientific exaggeration. 

According to data from the International Disaster Database, between 2020 and 2021, the climate events cited by Mann caused 21,500 deaths. That’s compared to the 18.1 million who died from COVID in the same period, according to COVID-19 the Data Repository by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University.

Mann was off by a factor of over 800. 

There just isn’t any scientific basis for the claim that climate kills anywhere close to the number of people COVID has killed. In fact, since 1920, the number of climate related deaths has plummeted 99%. 

Understanding the impact of climate change on extreme weather events is not so simple as saying that an extreme weather event wouldn’t have happened were it not for increases in CO2 in the atmosphere. 

The International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) uses two measurements to make determinations about the impact of climate change on extreme weather: observation and attribution. The first measurement determines if there is observable data of a trend in extreme weather beyond natural variability, and the second is the degree to which IPPC researchers attribute the trend to climate change.

For example, there’s a strong observation in the increase in frequency of heat waves, with a high level of confidence the increase can be attributed to climate change. Same with droughts. Deaths from heat waves have increased, but it should be noted that cold-related deaths — which a Lancet study found kill substantially more people than heat waves — have dropped more than the number of deaths from heat waves. So, on the whole, fewer people are dying from temperature extremes. 

And what about tornadoes? The trend is actually down. 

Using data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, University of Michigan economics professor emeritus Mark J. Perry determined that, between 1954 and 1985, the U.S. experienced an average of around 56 tornadoes per year with a rating of F3 or higher. That number dropped to 34 between 1986 and 2018.

What does the latest IPCC assessment have to say about trends in tornadoes? 

“Trends in tornadoes ... associated with severe convective storms are not robustly detected,” the report says. The researchers also note, “attribution of certain classes of extreme weather (eg, tornadoes) is beyond current modelling and theoretical capabilities.” 

In other words, there is no evidence that last week’s tornadoes had anything to do with climate change.  

So often, any attempt to mitigate exaggerations of climate activists with science and data is equated with claiming climate change is a hoax. Battling this exhausted strawman requires the obligatory note that climate change is a real problem. And it’s not one that should be ignored.

However, the exaggerations of alarmists like Mann who use natural disasters opportunistically to push for their political agendas — which are themselves based on those exaggerations — will solve nothing. 

It’s a lot like trying to address the problem of drunk driving by claiming that more people die every year from drunk driving than COVID, and then proceeding to push for bans on cars. 

Climate change deserves science-based solutions. Unsubstantiated exaggerations are not helping.