Guest post by Indur M. Goklany
Summary
Proponents of drastic curbs on greenhouse gas emissions claim that such emissions cause global warming and that this exacerbates the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, including extreme heat, droughts, floods and storms such as hurricanes and cyclones. But what matters is not the incidence of extreme weather events per se but the impact of such events—especially the human impact. To that end, it is instructive to examine trends in global mortality (i.e. the number of people killed) and mortality rates (i.e. the proportion of people killed) associated with extreme weather events for the 111-year period from 1900 to 2010.
Aggregate mortality attributed to all extreme weather events globally has declined by more than 90% since the 1920s, in spite of a four-fold rise in population and much more complete reporting of such events. The aggregate mortality rate declined by 98%, largely due to decreased mortality in three main areas:
- Deaths and death rates from droughts, which were responsible for approximately 60% of cumulative deaths due to extreme weather events from 1900–2010, are more than 99.9% lower than in the 1920s.
- Deaths and death rates for floods, responsible for over 30% of cumulative extreme weather deaths, have declined by over 98% since the 1930s.
- Deaths and death rates for storms (i.e. hurricanes, cyclones, tornados, typhoons), responsible for around 7% of extreme weather deaths from 1900–2008, declined by more than 55% since the 1970s.
To put the public health impact of extreme weather events into context, cumulatively they now contribute only 0.07% to global mortality. Mortality from extreme weather events has declined even as all-cause mortality has increased, indicating that humanity is coping better with extreme weather events than it is with far more important health and safety problems.
The decreases in the numbers of deaths and death rates reflect a remarkable improvement in society’s adaptive capacity, likely due to greater wealth and better technology, enabled in part by use of hydrocarbon fuels. Imposing additional restrictions on the use of hydrocarbon fuels may slow the rate of improvement of this adaptive capacity and thereby worsen any negative impact of climate change. At the very least, the potential for such an adverse outcome should be weighed against any putative benefit arising from such restrictions.
The full study with diagrams is here, courtesy of the Reason Foundation. The press release, Extreme Weather Events Are Killing Fewer People Than Ever Before,
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Dave Springer says: @ur momisugly September 27, 2011 at 4:19 am
“@ur momisuglyizen
As I knew, you can’t produce any actual evidence of how higher CO2 level is affecting the climate…”
Dave, It has never been about science. Instead it is has always been about a political “Hammer” used to give the United Nations more Clout and shepherd us into a world government and universal poverty aka Agenda 21. We could have the temperature plummet and glaciers threatening London and Washington DC and the Watermelons will STILL claim it was mankind/CO2 that was to blame and only if we worship at their GREEN/RED altar with self sacrifice will the world be saved.
The underlying drive of course is GREED. A small number of people want control of all the resources and they also want a large number of humans gone because they see them as parasites on THEIR beautiful earth.
REFERENCES:
The Wildland Project almost became law. Listing/links of bills, laws and treaties including Explanation of the UN Biodiversity Treaty and the Wildlands Project
Predicted Wildlands Map (Green is where humans are allowed to live)
Current:
Restoring America’s Big, Wild Animals and The Rewilding Institute: Rewilding North America
The above information dovetails very nicely with Anthony’s thread They had to burn the village to save it from global warming It is just one of many many piece of information about the calculated demise of humans by these people. How Goldman Sachs Caused a ‘Silent Mass Murder,’ Gambling on Starvation in the Developing World and same story different source all show the utter contempt for the lives of ordinary humans.
As Lomborg and others have pointed out, ad nauseum not that anyone cares, cold weather kills far more people than warm weather, and moderate warming would save far more lives than it might cost.
This says nothing about frequency. It’s all about deaths. My reasoning is that we’re better at handling extreme situations. Property damage would be something to check out. Though that would reasonably be higher in this age. Since most of our stuff is much much more expensive.
Please don’t try to make everything connected to global warming. It’s silly.
@- Dave Springer
“I at least want some published studies with methods and data that may be reviewed by qualified others. You may have heard of things being done this way before. It’s the scientific method.”
Hmmm…. strikes a vauge chord… -grin-
I had a better study than these with more detail, but try –
http://geosci-webdev.uchicago.edu/~archer/reprints/archer.2005.trigger.pdf
Or-
http://www.springerlink.com/content/n127u1p15421k4t3/
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0012821X03002358
http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=15129660
-“”Not the worst drought yet but it might exceed the 1950′s drought sometime next year.”-
Your link says that, but then says –
“The 11 months from October 2010 through August 2011 have been the driest for that 11-month period in Texas since 1895, when the state began keeping rainfall records. This summer in Texas has been the hottest in the country’s history, according to the National Weather Service….Inflows for June, July and August are less than one percent of average, making that three-month period the lowest for inflows of any three months in recorded history. September is on track to be the lowest single month for inflows on record, and 2011 is on pace to have the lowest inflows of any year in history.”
So its the driest and hottest in recorded history…. but not the worst drought?!!!
-“You can’t have your cake and eat it too, Izen. I won’t let you employ double standards. If 150 years of ocean surface temperatures isn’t good enough to establish any trends then 10 years of TOA energy budget isn’t enough either.
Can you spell “intellectually dishonest”, Izen?”-
Dyslexic as I am, no I can’t spell interlectualy disshonest; but I do know the difference in statistical difficulty in detecting a trend and a noisy ‘cycle’.
You can CERTAINLY establish a trend in 150 years of SSTs, but not any cycles with sigma certainty.
“We tend to forget that we have been a fossil fuel economy for only a very short period of time – around 200 years or so. Thus, while it may seem normal to those of us who live in it, in 200 years it is highly doubtful that our economy will be based on fossil fuels.”
While this is certainly true, it’s also certainly true whether or not man made global warming will have a significant impact on the climate or significant negative impact on the global economy during that period. It is further more almost certainly true whether we decide to spend a signficant portion of our present economy on disaster preparation and emergency efforts to produce new energy sources, or if we simply continue to advance our technology and adopt new energy sources as they become cost effective and robust options. After all, cheap energy sources will always be attractive both to industry and to the idealist.
I think the debate over global warming is a distraction that prevents us, well most of us anyway, from agreeing over the things that we can agree on. Most conservatives would readily embrace _conserv_ation; most progressives would readily embrace _progress_. The problem is that we’ve allow the debate over how to utilize the planet to be hijacked by a combination of Marxists, pseudo-scientists, luddites, and new age religious (but I repeat myself). What we need is not to focus so much on whether the Earth is getting warmer (it is), or one whether using fuels at their harvest cost rather than their replacement cost is unsustainable (it is), but on the engineering of the future that we want. It would be perfectly easy to get conservatives behind energy policy as a matter of national security and improved industrial activity. But the problem is that we don’t have the engineers actually in charge – we are letting energy policy be set by C students who believe in UFOs, Crop Circles, and the healing power of crystals.
@Izen
“So its the driest and hottest in recorded history…. but not the worst drought?!!!”
It’s the driest and hottest 11-month period , Izen. This is classic cherry picking. Since when is 11-months an interval of interest to which we apply comparative metrics?
The drought of record was the hottest, driest decade and the Highland Lakes reservoirs (Lakes Travis and Buchannan) reached their lowest combined storage level during that decade. The total rainfall deficit in the current decade may indeed exceed the 1950’s but it still has a ways to go to get there as 2007 was the wettest year on record and that was only 4 years ago so must be included in any running decade window.
You’re a very poor loser, son.
The drought of record was the driest and hottest decade and took place in the 1950s. What part of that don’t you understand?
criminogenic says:
September 25, 2011 at 6:20 pm
Deaths are not a very good index due to large improvements in Health care, rescue, transport, building standards and Weather warning systems over the Century.
Especially rescue and transport made possible by fossil fuel based cars, planes, boats.
How many times have you heard of people rescued by public transport systems? Trains and buses? Horse and buggy? Windmills? How about folks that saved themselves because they had technology and resources at hand to do so?
“We tend to forget that we have been a fossil fuel economy for only a very short period of time – around 200 years or so.”
We have a fossil fuel economy because almost all the trees in Europe and North America had been burned for fuel. Coal saved what forests remained. A fact easily confirmed by looking at history books. Look at the third world today, where forests have been cut down to make charcoal, leading to desertification. That is the real climate change. Except for fossil fuel most of us would never have been born. There simply was not enough energy available before fossil fuels to support large cities like we have today. Without fossil fuels there would be a lot less people, and most of them would be living as peasants farming the land at the mercy of the elements and the feudal lords.
Deaths from cold will probably go up throughout the century (and perhaps beyond). On that note, here in Nor Cal, we appear to have a better than even chance of the exact sort of early onset of Winter that hit the Donner Party. Winter storm conditions may be manifest in the high country by this time next week or even a bit earlier.