Climate & Energy · Thursday, 27 August 2026

01 · Briefing · what happened

Heat killed 40,000 in England since 1988, the official count says. Three new studies say the count is too narrow.

Climate & Energy 1 min 32 sources

Britain's statisticians put a 38-year number on heat deaths in the same week three separate studies found heat sitting inside illnesses nobody had been counting.

40,000

heat-linked deaths in England

on the hottest days from 1988 to 2025, against 139,000 on the coldest [1]

1,800

diagnosis codes tested at once

Chicago searched all of them instead of a chosen shortlist [2]

35,000

extra deaths in Europe this summer

from barely half the continent, with August still uncounted [3]

times New York paid customers to cut demand in 2025

against a previous ten-year high of eight [8]

At a glance

The Office for National Statistics published England and Wales's climate-related mortality data on Wednesday: over 40,000 more people died on the hottest days between 1988 and 2025 than expected. [1]
Cold still kills far more in England, with 139,000 deaths linked to the coldest days over the same 38 years, but the ONS says the gap is narrowing. [1]
Those figures stop before this summer. Britain's health agency already estimates 2,877 heat deaths in the May and June heatwaves alone, nearly double the whole of summer 2025. [1]
Across the continent at least 35,000 more people than usual died in Europe's four back-to-back heatwaves, on incomplete returns from barely half the countries. [3]
Germany reported about 14,000 heat-related deaths between 6 April and 9 August, with 9,600 in the single week of 22 to 28 June. Its previous worst year was 8,900. [3]
Heat is almost never written on a death certificate. It aggravates an existing illness, so people die of a heart attack, a stroke or kidney failure and the heat leaves no trace in the record. [3]
A Northwestern University study published Wednesday took the opposite approach: it tested all 1,800 diagnosis codes used in Chicago emergency rooms against the city's hottest days. [2]
Across roughly 900,000 adult visits from 2011 to 2023 it found hot days raising visits for kidney failure, swelling, varicose veins, severe dehydration, leg injuries and accidental firearm discharge. [2]
It did not find the heart and lung link everyone expects. A study author says those patients are often coded for the complication that brought them in, such as failing kidneys. [2]
A German study of 2.83 million children's emergency visits found ear infections up 25% on the hottest days, newborn conditions up 57%, and called for child-specific heat thresholds. [4]
A meta-analysis of 21 studies covering 5.6 million pregnancies put a 5% rise in risk at a daily high of 30.6C. [5] It also found no agreed way to measure heat stress. [5]
A separate study estimates 580 million children under 10, over 40% of that age group, already face at least 20 extra dangerous heat-stress days a year. [6]

Forces in play

Heat's counted toll High↑

England's official 38-year figure is 40,000, and this summer is not in it. Europe's partial count for this summer alone is 35,000. [1][3]

Emergency-care strain High↑

England's emergency departments had their busiest ever summer, and London's ambulance service took 25,000 more calls than last year. [1]

Power systems under heat Building↑

Europe's nuclear, gas and coal plants cut output in the heat while solar and batteries covered demand, and hydro had its lowest summer in seven years. [10][11] US modelling says current policy could cost 540 GW of planned renewables. [28]

Blind spots in the data Easing↓

Three studies in one week added ear infections, kidney failure and swollen legs to the list of things heat sends to hospital. [2][4][6]

In play Office for National Statistics — published England and Wales's 38-year count of climate-related deaths Northwestern University's Defusing Disasters group — searched every emergency diagnosis code rather than a chosen shortlist Robert Koch Institute — Germany's public health agency, modelling heat deaths as the summer runs UK Health Security Agency — put England's May and June toll at 2,877 back in July

How it unfolded

1988-2025 England records 40,000 extra deaths on its hottest days and 139,000 on its coldest [1]
22-28 June Germany logs 9,600 heat-related deaths in a single week [3]
30 July Britain's health agency puts England's May and June toll at 2,877 [1]
Tue Europe's partial summer count passes 35,000, and oceans are reported at record heat [3][7]
Wed the ONS ledger and the Chicago all-codes study land the same day [1][2]
Next August figures get consolidated while a strengthening El Nino builds toward 2027 [1][7]

Where this points

The test is August: Europe's count covers barely half the continent and stops before the month ended, so the summer total will rise before it settles. [3]

Also today

9 more stories on this beat.

Supreme Court takes Boulder's climate case

The US Supreme Court hears Suncor Energy v Boulder County on 5 October, the first case of its new term. [12] Nearly 70 outside briefs have been filed, from members of Congress to tribes and former military leaders. [12]

Why it matters — Nine years of American climate-damages suits, none yet at trial, could turn on it.
Arctic drilling gets a faster lane

The US Interior Department is drafting a rule letting winter oil exploration in Alaska's 23-million-acre National Petroleum Reserve skip project-by-project environmental review. [13] Norway said the same week it will drill the Barents Sea whatever the EU decides, and asked its top court to restore three struck-down permits. [14][15]

Why it matters — Environmental review is where climate objections legally live, so shortening it removes the argument rather than answering it. Exxon is separately automating half its Permian rigs by 2028. [29]
EPA moves to end data-centre pollution notices

A proposed EPA rule would end the Clean Air Act requirement that data-centre projects tell the public, through state agencies, how much pollution they will release. [16] Disclosure would become voluntary at state officials' discretion. [16]

Why it matters — A pollutant nobody has to report is a pollutant nobody can count, which is the lead story's problem in another form. Data centres are one of the drivers of the 3.6% annual growth in world electricity demand the IEA expects to 2030. [9]
122 firms tied to the West's lost water

Climate change cut the American West's typical snowpack by over a third and streamflows by about 13% from 2014 to 2024. [17] About half of that traces to emissions from 122 fossil-fuel and cement companies, a study in Communications Earth and Environment found. [17]

Why it matters — Attribution has moved from naming a cause to naming a share, and a share is what a damages claim needs.
Germany cancels credits Exxon had bought

Germany's environment agency withdrew carbon credits from 30 China-based projects that claimed to cut pollution from fossil-fuel extraction, including one bought by ExxonMobil. [18] Bloomberg obtained the January report through a freedom-of-information request. [18]

Why it matters — The credits were sold, used and counted before anyone checked whether the cuts had happened.
Biofuel credit prices fall on a moved date

US credits proving a refiner blended biofuel fell to $1.75 on Monday, their lowest since 15 April, after the EPA extended a compliance deadline. [19] The White House is separately pressing for wider small-refinery exemptions, which Midwest attorneys general oppose. [20]

Why it matters — The credit is worth whatever the rule says it is worth, and US refineries are already running near maximum. [30]
Qatar's gas exports at 4% of last year

Six months into the US-Iran war, Qatar's liquefied gas cargo exports have fallen to 18 from 509 a year earlier, a loss Reuters puts at about $24bn. [21] European gas stocks sit at record lows for the time of year. [21]

Why it matters — The trade is being redrawn, not just repriced: Sinopec is buying more Brazilian and African crude, and Iraq wants a bigger OPEC quota. [22][23]
Saudi Arabia orders 8 GWh of batteries

Saudi Arabia awarded $1.16bn for 8 gigawatt-hours of battery storage across four sites, enough to run 2 gigawatts of power for four hours. [24] Europe added 36 GWh in 2025, up 48% on the year, passing 100 GWh in operation for the first time. [25]

Why it matters — Storage is what stops cheap midday solar being worthless: Portugal's largest solar plant entered administration this week as Iberian prices sagged. [26] Arizona and Nevada are buying too. [31][32]
Florida's textbooks lose their climate content

Publishers watered down climate passages at Florida's request, cutting a marine-biology draft's line that climate change kills at least 150,000 people a year. [27] Elsewhere 'climate change' became 'changes in the environment'. [27]

Why it matters — The deleted sentence is exactly the kind of number this week was spent producing.

02 · Lesson · why it matters

You only find what you wrote down to look for

A study can only answer about the things it named in advance, so the size of what it missed never appears in the result.

How it works

A study has to name what it will look for
The names come from what we already suspect
So the result can only confirm, deny or size that list
Anything never named cannot appear as a finding
Widen the list to everything, and the surprises arrive

The twist

Searching every diagnosis found heat in swollen legs and accidental gunshots, and missed the heart attacks everyone expects, because the filing system decides what a case is.

Where you've seen this

Drug safety

side effects are reported against a list of expected harms, so an unlisted one takes years to surface

Crime figures

a country records the offences its forms have a box for, and the rest is not a category

Workplace injuries

a log built around machinery accidents rarely counts slow damage from noise or repetition

School exams

a test measures what the syllabus named, and what it left out stops looking like learning

The catch

Search everything and some of what rises is chance, so the bar has to go up, and a higher bar hides real effects. An outside reviewer called Chicago's bar conservative.

And the whole of it

The systems that record what happened to you, a diagnosis code, an incident form, a benefits category, were all written before you arrived. Everyone is counted in boxes drawn from an older idea of what goes wrong.

03 · Lab · your turn

The List You Search

Choose how wide to search a hospital's records for heat, and watch that choice decide most of what you find.

04 · Truth · what's really going on

Stripped of the framing

Heat's toll is not new, the counting is, and every wider count finds more, because the older counts only looked for what somebody had already named.

Why it lands — A number attached to a named cause feels like it was checked. Heat deaths sounds like a tally of certificates, when it is a modelled gap between the deaths that happened and the deaths a normal week would have brought.

Claimed

What people said. Not yet a fact.

The Office for National Statistics

More deaths in England are still linked to the coldest days than the hottest: 139,000 against 40,000 since 1988. [1]

True for the whole period, and the same release says the proportion on the hottest days has risen and the gap is narrowing. [1]
The US Interior Department

Easing environmental review for Alaska winter drilling creates 'a more efficient, predictable, and effective process' while upholding standards. [13]

The rule it is drafting would let winter exploration proceed with no project-specific review at all. [13]
Joe Goffman, a former EPA air official

The Clean Air Act was meant to be 'an ironclad promise' that the public gets a voice on polluting projects. [16]

He is arguing against the proposed rule, which would make data-centre disclosure voluntary at state officials' discretion. [16]
Germany's environment agency

Credits from 30 China-based projects were suspicious enough to withdraw, one of them bought by ExxonMobil. [18]

The finding is in a report dated mid-January that only became public through a freedom-of-information request. [18]

Verified

What we could actually stand behind.

England recorded over 40,000 more deaths on its hottest days between 1988 and 2025, and 139,000 on its coldest. [1]

How we checked — Both figures come from the same ONS release published on Wednesday, and are quoted consistently against it.
The Chicago study tested all 1,800 emergency diagnosis codes across roughly 900,000 adult visits from 2011 to 2023. [2]

How we checked — Stated in the Science Advances paper and described independently by two researchers outside the study who were asked about the method.
Germany recorded roughly 14,000 heat-related deaths this summer, 9,600 of them in the week of 22 to 28 June. [3]

How we checked — Attributed to the Robert Koch Institute, Germany's own public health agency, which models these deaths as the season runs.
Qatar's liquefied gas cargo exports have fallen to 18 from 509 a year earlier. [21]

How we checked — Shipping data reported by Reuters. The $24bn revenue figure beside it is Reuters' own calculation, not an independent one, and we have only that source for both.

Nobody knows

Open questions — ours included.

How many people the heat killed in Europe this summer.

August is consolidated nowhere yet, Italy has published only partial indicators, and France's early figure is drawn from electronic death certificates covering about 80% of deaths. [3]
Whether the 35,000 total means one thing.

Spain and Germany model deaths attributable to heat, France reports all-cause excess first and attributes later, and Italy uses municipal returns. Adding them mixes different measurements. [3]
How much the Chicago study still missed.

It required at least 30% of a diagnosis's cases to fall on relatively hot days. An outside researcher called that bar conservative, so the result is a floor, not a total. [2]
Whether heat spares the heart and lungs in Chicago, or the coding hides it.

The study found no link there, and a study author says such patients are often coded for the complication that brought them in. Nobody has separated the two explanations. [2]

Who gains

Cities and states suing oil companies — Attribution work now assigns a numbered share of a specific harm to named firms, which is the shape a damages claim needs. [17] The Supreme Court hears Boulder's case on 5 October. [12]
Battery suppliers and their financiers — A summer that cut output at thermal plants and sagged midday solar prices makes stored power worth more, and Saudi Arabia signed $1.16bn of orders this week. [10][24][26]
US refiners — Running near maximum for the longest stretch in a quarter century, they saw a compliance deadline pushed back and are being offered wider exemptions on top. [19][20][30]
Oil producers with room to grow — With Gulf supply disrupted, Iraq is seeking a bigger OPEC quota and Exxon is automating half its Permian rigs by 2028. [23][29]

Who pays

Older people and small children in hot cities — London recorded England's highest heat-attributable death count, and in Germany emergency visits on hot days rose most among children under five. [1][4]
People living beside proposed data centres — If the EPA rule passes they lose the notice that tells them what a plant will emit before it is built, and the right to object on that record. [16]
Midwest corn growers — Blending credits fell 34 cents in a day, and wider small-refinery exemptions would cut the mandated demand those credit prices rest on. [19][20]
Buyers who trusted cheap offsets — Germany voided credits from 30 projects only after they had been sold, used and counted against someone's emissions. [18]

05 · Hope · carry this

For decades these deaths sat in a gap nobody had added up. This week several teams added them up, and a harm that is counted can finally be argued about.