The one and only solution

Continuing from previous post in which I described the start of a television news item on the modeled impacts of future weather on Europe. After that introduction, an expert was brought up to explain the paper a bit more, in this case Serge De Gheldere. As far as I know, he is an engineer (specialized in material technology and product design) who got his climate training from no one less than Al Gore, so I was a bit puzzled what his expertise was concerning this specific paper.

He first explained the outcome of the paper (translated from Dutch):

Fifty times more deaths by weather

VTM news August 5, 2017: fifty times more deaths by weather

The hyperbole level was high in this news item from the VTM news of last Saturday: Fifty Times More Deaths By Weather. This is how it is introduced (translated from Dutch):

South and Central Europe are moaning under a heatwave these days and this has consequences. In Italy, for example, is it up to 46 degrees and there are already three deaths. It is an example of what will happen much more by the end of this century: people who die from extreme weather. That is what researchers of a working group of the European Commission say. According to their study, there will be about 152,000 deaths by weather-related phenomena per year between 2071 and 2100, mainly caused by climate change.

That 50 times more is compared to the weather-related deaths in the reference period 1981→2010 and projected into the future with demographic and climate models. The study at issue is titled Increasing risk over time of weather-related hazards to the European population: a data-driven prognostic study and is written by Giovanni Forzieri et al of the Joint Research Center of the European Commission.