With huge attention from the press, top medical editors from The Lancet, British Medical Journal and many others published an editorial in over 200 medical journals. They called for “emergency action” on climate change, but sadly, their main argument was based on a misleading claim that heat deaths are rising rapidly. They claimed that the number of global heat deaths has gone up by more than 50% among old people in the past 20 years. But they failed to mention that the number of old people has risen by almost as much.

Bjorn Lomborg reached out to the editors with a letter asking them to fix their unsound argument; unfortunately, none of them have corrected their mistake so far.

Although we frequently hear about expensive floods, the relative toll that floods take in property and lives has decreased over time. In the U.S., which has some of the best long-term data, flooding costs as a share of gross domestic product declined almost 10-fold since 1903 to 0.05% of GDP, while annual flood death risk—fatalities per million—dropped almost threefold. World-wide data are sparser, but flood research shows costs relative to GDP and deaths relative to population have decreased globally from 1980 to 2010.

Though it hasn’t been well publicized, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says it has “low confidence in the human influence on the changes in high river flows on the global scale.” It expects more areas will see the frequency of floods go up than go down—a negative impact of climate change, but one that’s much less dramatic than media coverage might suggest. And as the world grows richer, infrastructure and technology are likely to drive down relative flooding costs and deaths.

Read Lomborg's column in The Wall Street Journal.