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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Dave Andrews; thanks for the link.
MIke Bryant,
I hope you didn’t think I was a proponent of eugenics. I was just stating that we have disrupted the natural selection process. It may be for the good or it may not be. None of us alive today will ever know. .
The whole 2003 heat wave numbers of Europe have been exagerated by Gore et al. They say Portugal contributed with 13000 deaths, when the real number was 14, and really only about 2000 excess deaths…
One more inconvenient truth…
ecotretas@gmail.com
Looking at my own data for the 1920’s, I see 6.5 million killed in China alone due to drought and famine. In contrast, the deaths in the 1910’s were about 0.2 million, so there was a real increase in reported deaths between these two decades. I have the increase by a factor of 30 or more whereas Goklany sets it at about 20. Reasonably close.
Tom, whenever anyone decides who lives or dies based on his or her genetics we have already all lost.
Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Indur: Yes, much of what I said was about other causes of death. Someone had asked what was the cause of the huge numbers after 1920.
I saw no other explanation except that the numbers were in someway contaminated by deaths from war related problems such famine, disease, exposure, and poor medical care.
WWI ended in late 1918 but historians know civil society suffered more afterward than during the 1914-1918 war. And that lasted for decades.
Interesting study. I can’t believe the numbers from 1900-1960 accurately reflect natural disasters. But sobeit.
Evan Jones…please reread my post, i said per year.
Yes, I know. But I was actually responding not to your post but to Chris D.’s comment (which I quoted verbatim). He had apparently missed the header.
I was just stating that we have disrupted the natural selection process.
We ARE the natural selection process!
2:44 AM NW Washington State 07-07-08.Take that Gore.The real sadness to this AGW hype is I have some close friends that will not even open their minds long enough to see any other side to the story,especially the college educated ones.A mind is a terrible thing to close….Keep up the great work.
[…] severe weather merely by their methods of reporting. Bottom line, though, is that it’s not true. Going Down: Death Rates Due to Extreme Weather Events Watts Up With That? __________________ "Skepticism is the highest of duties, and blind faith the unpardonable […]
I think it’s important to point out that insofar as the data is unreliable, it is on the side of undercounting the further back one goes. Does this invalidate the conclusion on account of bad data, or does it perhaps make the point even more strongly?
Mr. Burns,
Since no data are perfect, you could say they are all “flawed”. Obviously this does not prevent us from making conclusions from such data; what we must do however, is make a determination as to how much the data is in error. Then we can decide how much certainty to place on the conclusions. Generally as one goes back in time, data is less and less accurate, which is to be expected. This does create problems, and statisticians continue to devise new ways to quantify these errors and uncertainties, but it’s not an insurmountable problem by any means.
Mr. Penrose,
You are correct that no data is prefect. Are you saying that the data in this study, in your opinion, is good enough to base conclusions?
Let’s look at this study.
The question is whether or not the data is good enough to warrant a conclusion.
The study is titled “Death and Death Rates Due to Extreme Weather Events”. The data in Table 1 is mainly from Em-Dat, who runs a disaster database, not an extreme weather event database. I did not read the paper before I made my first comment. I had looked at table 1 and saw numbers that made no sense. I have now read the paper and the numbers still make no sense.
There is no definition of an “extreme weather event” in the paper. Without a definition, what is the author talking about? Without a definition, how can any of the numbers be verified? Mr. Goklany has questions (in the comments above) about the extreme temperatures deaths in WW2.
When are high temperatures an extreme event? When are low temperatures an extreme event? Is there such a thing as a normal hurricane? An extreme hurricane?
In Table 1 there is a line for Wild Fires. Is a wild fire an extreme weather event?
Table 1 shows 30 times increase (.03 vs .91) for the risk of death from extreme temperatures. Do you think that is reasonable estimate? Do you think this is a reasonable conclusion?
Do you believe that the 110 deaths per year is a realistic number?
That is the problem in a nutshell. Ironically, I agree with Mr. Goklany’s conclusion, but the data as shown is so flawed it should not be used.
[…] Going Down: Death Rates Due to Extreme Weather Events […]
Evan Jones (08:56:08) :
I think it’s important to point out that insofar as the data is unreliable, it is on the side of undercounting the further back one goes. Does this invalidate the conclusion on account of bad data, or does it perhaps make the point even more strongly?
I just Want to repeat what Evan Jones Did say back there!
Thats the Best I could come out with!!
“In addition, some state policies may inappropriately create a “moral hazard” situation in which individuals have incentives to bear less than their full burden of risk, effectively transferring portion of their risk to other segments of society; this may place even wealthier populations at greater physical risk (in addition to increasing financial risk; Goklany 2000).
Mr. Goklany: Would you give an illustration of what you mean by this?
[…] of Hurricanes; Extreme Storms; Extinctions; Floods; Droughts; Ocean Acidification; Polar Bears; Extreme weather deaths; Frogs; lack of atmospheric dust; Malaria; the failure of oceans to warm and rise as […]