THERE’S just no pleasing some people. The ‘KlimaSeniorinnen’, a group of 2,000 elderly Swiss women who, according to WorldData, are already blessed by living in one of the top five nations for female life expectancy, have won a judgment from Strasbourg’s European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) which would force their government into taking legislative measures supposedly to ensure they live even longer.

The court in its unique wisdom found that as a result of its climate ‘inaction’, the Swiss government has breached Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which guarantees the ‘right to respect for private and family life’. Work that one out if you will. It can be interpreted only as ‘Swiss policy is disrespectful, because by its negligence it has caused more hot weather that in turn makes old people die sooner than they might, other things being equal’. Umm.

Needless to say the eco-fanatics were cock-a-hoop at the ruling. The lead lawyer is very proud that after nine years of intensive work, her clients had ‘finally got their due’.

The court’s ruling rests on a combination of contentious assertions – that there are more heatwaves now than in the past, that they are increasingly deadly, that human emissions are to blame, and that this is a human rights issue to be determined by a supranational court. None of this stands up. On the ‘hot v cold’ triggered deaths question, the balance of the evidence is that severe cold knocks out more old people than heatwaves do. While excessive summer heat can kill, it is extreme cold that causes more fatalities amongst the vulnerable elderly. Roughly twice as many people die from cold in any given year than from heat.