During our discussion of the preposterous news story from Pravda, claiming this headline: “Earth begins to kill people for changing its climate” a scientist dropped in to provide us some insight into his latest paper. It was highly relevant at the time since one of the repeating themes we see in the mainstream (and not so mainstream) media is the attribution of increasing death due to severe weather events to “global warming”.
But that is not supported by the real data, it is a false premise.
In the paper, Indur Goklany examines the worldwide trends and makes some surprising discoveries base of examining data from the World Health Organization, NOAA, and other sources.
Some have claimed that, all else being equal, climate change will increase the frequency or severity of weather-related extreme events (see, e.g., IPCC 2001; Patz 2004; MacMichael and Woodruff 2004). This study examines whether losses due to such events (as measured by aggregate deaths and death rates2) have increased globally and for the United States in recent decades. It will also attempt to put these deaths and death rates into perspective by comparing them with the overall mortality burden, and briefly discuss what trends in these measures imply about human adaptive capacity.
The most telling graph is the first one in the paper:
Goklany writes:
Despite the recent spate of deadly extreme weather events – such as the 2003 European heat wave and the 2004 and 2005 hurricane seasons in the USA – aggregate mortality and mortality rates due to extreme weather events are generally lower today than they used to be.
Globally, mortality and mortality rates have declined by 95 percent or more since the 1920s. The largest improvements came from declines in mortality due to droughts and floods, which apparently were responsible for 93 percent of all deaths caused by extreme events during the 20th Century. For windstorms, which, at 6 percent, contributed most of the remaining fatalities, mortality rates are also lower today but there are no clear trends for mortality. Cumulatively, the declines more than compensated for increases due to the 2003 heat wave.
There is also a table of supporting data:
Click for a larger image
There are a number of things that have contributed to this trend of lowered death rates due to extreme weather events that I have identified, here is a short list:
- Better real-time monitoring due to satellite technology and surface networks
- Better forecasting due to increased skill sets and improvements in computer aided forecasting
- Better warning lead times, due to satellites for hurricanes and radar for tornadoes and flash floods
- Better and faster warning dissemination thanks to radio, TV, and Internet
But there is always this recurring complaint that “there are more natural disasters now than 50-100 years ago”. From a perspective rooted in the human experience of the western world, this is likely due to the instant communications we have now. 50 years ago, if there was a massive flood in China, we might not hear about it for days, 100 years ago, perhaps never.
The shrinking world due to instant global communications will ensure that our frequency of such experiences of severe weather will increase. As testament to this, this very blog entry will be read by a few people worldwide within minutes of its posting. Those outside of the USA, please post a comment to illustrate. This is posted at 9:10 PM Pacific time, 4:10 UTC on July 5th.
See more in the paper: Death and Death Rates Due to Extreme Weather Events, Indur Goklany
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11.38 (GMT +1) here in cloudy Copenhagen.
The 2003 heatwave is already a distant memory.
Heading to drought plagued Costa Brava in Spain.
Gonna get me some global warming.
Read at 10:09 CET in France.
read at 11 am yorkshire uk. favourite site. keep it up anthony.
If the Earth is moving into a seriously cool phase it will be a case of : ‘You ain’t seen nuthin’ yet !’
The huge jump around 1920 was probably the world wide flu.
The Civil War in Russia was going on and there were widespread wars and genocides in central and eastern Europe. The Turks were killing the Armenians or driving them out. And Greece and Turkey each kicked the other’s people out. China was in almost total chaos during the decade.
Several massive earthquakes occurred in Asia in the 1920s.
Until the mid-1950s things were seldom quiet.
The war casualties were smaller than the deaths from famine, disease, and forced relocations.
I suspect the low values before WWI are mostly from poor records. Still, those two decades were noted for political stability and for fine weather which produced good crops all around the world. It has been called the golden age of farming.
Sunday 6th July @ur momisugly 11:46am, England 🙂
7:30 AM Sunday July 6 Columbus,Oh
Greetings from Japan 8:32PM.
Great site. I have been reading your stories for few years already. Good stuff!
This is a vicious cycle!
The most effective propaganda machine for global warming, now..climate change is the lit up box at the other end of the living room.
Disaster sell and the cable TV news channels broadcasting 24/7 must be filled with news related disaster stories.
Inevitable, the general perception among people is that there is now a dramatic increase in weather related disasters due to global warming.
This of course creates more people to get engage in global warming eco-environmentalism so that they can help in the fight to save the world from global warming.
Politician and decision makers have to be news junkies in order keep up with what happens in the news.
If you tell them that there is no increase in weather related disasters, they just stare at you think you must be mad.
But, they are all fighting a mirage.
A valuable post; Lomborg has been coping flack for some time for the temerity of showing that not only are prosperity indicators postive globally, but that, if AGW is real, it will bring benefits. I might add conventional wisdom is that Lomborg is a warmist, but on reading CHP 3 of “Cool It” it would seem his ‘belief’ is a hypothetical one.
Lomborg draws heavily on WHO statistics and examines a number of European locations in making a comparison between heat and cold deaths; his method is refreshingly simple; at each of those sites he notes that temp which involves the least number of death from temp, either hot or cold, which becomes the optimum temp; at each of those sites he than compares the deaths from temp above and below that temp; deaths from cold consistently outnumber deaths from heat by more than 2 to 1.
Lomborg has been subject to vociferous criticism, especially from Kare Fog at this site;
http://www.lomborg-errors.dk/coolitBchap2heat.htm
Fog has specifically addressed Lomborg’s conclusions about heat being likely to cause fewer deaths than heat and that any AGW caused increase in temp would involve fewer temp-related deaths; Fog concludes that Lomborg is wrong because an increase in temp would mean that a graphical depiction of temp deaths would have its optimum point shifted to the right with a maintainence of the proportionate death rates from heat/cold on either side. But this can’t be right because the new optimum would have a larger benevolent flat spot on either side; on the new cooler side it take in that prior optimum and low cooling portion, and on the warmer side, the graph would have a longer flat portion to reflect the lessor rate of heat deaths at the low end of slight increases in temp.
Fog does refer to NOAA statistics which show that from 1986-2006 deaths from heat outnumber deaths from cold by 3007 to 515;
http://www.nws.noaa.gov/om/hazstats/images/67-years.pdf
I presume the NOAA data is US based. In the Goklany paper, at Table 3, for the period 1979-2002 deaths from cold were more than twice the deaths from heat; this is sourced from USCB; I’m not sure who or what USCB is; is some clarification possible?
Read by a Norwegian currently in Thailand 19:19 local time
Read here on the East Coast USA at 0815 EDT. Referenced at the Global warming Clearinghouse at 0822.
CoRev, Editor
http://globalwarmingclearinghouse.blogspot.com
Read this in Canada’s Capital on Sunday July 6 2008 at 1328 GMT.
I have a feeling I’m missing something really huge and am about to make a total idiot of myself but I just have to ask…
I thought the global temperature metrics showed that – depending on which one you look at – the earth is either a little cooler than during the base periods or just a little warmer than during the base periods but still cooler than 10 years ago. Doesn’t that – sort of by definition – mean that any extreme weather occurring now can’t be caused by Global Warming since the globe is not currently warming (or warmed)?
(In New Jersey, Sunday, July 6, 9:14am US EDT)
Read at 11:33 Cairns Australia. …. Yep, it is indeed a small world…. But it is still the same world.
Outstanding entry. Thank you.
Such are the benefits of study into meteorological/climatological phenomena and the communication of such research to the public at large. Gee, perhaps scientists aren’t just about securing that grant money and siphoning it off to buy their BMW’s?
My guess is that the low that shows up in the 1910 – 1919 decade probably occurred because no one was bothering to report these natural disasters or even paying much attention to them. Think about the times – that was actually one of the highest death-toll decades of the 20th century, and yet his graph shows a low point? You have 9 million dead from WW1, anywhere from 10 – 20 million dead worldwide (who knows the actual number?) from the great Influenza Pandemic of 1918, you have untold millions dead of revolution and starvation in Russia and in the old Ottoman Empire, you have China in another round of central govm’t vs warlords, with no one to count the dead – and not to mention the millions of post ww1 Central European refugees who simply disapeared into the earth with no one to note their passing.
With all that going on, I doubt a natural disaster could get noticed at all. That graph should have had a “Total deaths from all causes” bar to be fair, and that decade would be shown for what it was – worldwide carnage.
This is what I hate the most about global warming science. The headlines usually say “disaster”, but when you look into what the data actually shows, it usually says something completely different.
Global warming scientists even complain when their paper doesn’t generate enough doom and gloom reporting even though the data produced doesn’t show a problem at all.
Read in Germany. Not minutes later really in my case, but would have been so if I’d been home yesterday night.
Great work, Anthony! Many thanks for sharing your perspective — much needed.
I simply do not believe that there were only 110 deaths due to extreme temps throughout the entire period of 1900-1989. I guess data is only as good as the mechanisms in place to collect and then reliably report it, as Anthony has mentioned.
REPLY: Chinese made heaters and air conditioners are everywhere, anyone can afford them. I’ve even see bums in shack house that have space heaters they’ve scrounged from trash bins and worked up a way to steal electricity.
I have been talking about this for years (the declining death rate from natural disasters.) This is one of the most amazing achievements of mankind. Over the last 100 years we have (mankind) been able to reduce the mortality from natural disasters by 98%. An AMAZING figure. We have reduced the annual death rate from 1 million/year to 20,000/year. We have done this through a combination of all the things humans are good at. We have been able to build better structures, dams and to move rivers in some cases. We have built levees and we have observations systems that can predict or warn us in advance. We have developed biological defenses and medicine. We have improved transportation and ability to respond quickly. All this has meant that the death rate for natural disasters has plunged more than anything else we have accomplished in the last century. Somehow this news isn’t well known. People still think that natural disasters are a big deal and they are in places where we still have not dealt with them, i.e. china, indonesia, iran, … The simple fact is that if these countries were to improve their systems over the next 20 or 30 years to the level of the west the rate of death from natural disasters would continue a massive decrease. By 2080 when all these deaths are “supposed” to occur from natural disasters caused by AGW nobody will die!!! More people will die from falling off ladders then will die from natural disasters every year. A further 98% reduction in death rates by 2080 will make death from natural disaster more unlikely than falling off trampolines is today.
I’ve been pointing this out for years and yet people continue to hang the entire AGW deadly side effects almost entirely on increased natural disasters. No matter if this specious argument were true that natural disasters would increase it is of almost zero consequence. We have nothing to fear from increased natural disasters even if it were true (which it isn’t) As all of you know there is no increase in number, severity or frequency in any measureable way from global warming. In fact, the opposite it seems like natural disasters seem to be more related to cooling temperatures which may explain why in the last year we’ve had a spate of bad luck. Temperatures have plunged in the last 12 months bringing us back 30 years in terms of global temperature and then we see a small surge in natural disasters. We may see an increase in natural disasters not because of global warming but because we appear to be heading into a cold period but regardless of whether natural disasters are tied to warmer or cooler weather is irrelevant because our mitigation strategies are so effective it is of no consequence in the large scope of our problems in this world.
Read at 12:30 Montevideo, Uruguay. great blog..
Interesting indeed.
I often do the mental eyeball roll (and sometimes the physical eyeball roll) when I hear seemingly normal people talk about the greatly increased death toll from modern weather events due to “global warming”. When I ask “Oh, really? Like what?” they point to hurricane Katrina and the French summer debacle of 2003, both of which, IMO, could have been largely prevented by people using some common sense and effective government to care for those who could not care for themselves.
Read on July 9 at 11:40 a.m. EST from NE Florida.
Quick question, what is the death rate per event? Galveston was hit by the 1900 hurricane with not only no warning, but assurance from the Weather service that it wasn’t anything to worry about. We have improved our warning and evacuation ability by orders of magnitude. The Indian ocean tsunami death toll was exacerbated due to a lack of warning capability.
Regardless of what the media (and Dems) imply Katrina was nowhere near the disaster it would have been without the weather warning and evacuation. Katrina was a problem of the local and state governments failing to evacuate people who couldn’t get out themselves along with people who wouldn’t leave when they could. Imagine the situation if no one had left New Orleans because no warning was issued.