Despite all the fear-mongering over the condition of our planet as well as the human condition, there is encouraging news. Dina D. Pomeranz writes on Twitter: (h/t to Steve McIntyre)
This figure is quite amazing. Never ever before has the world changed as it has from 1990 to 2015.
Here’s another:
There’s a lot of data to explore in this website: https://ourworldindata.org/
I found this chart particularly interesting, especially the nuclear part.
According to this, wind power kills about 0.9 people per terawatt-hour.
Yes he has just used the statistics in the same stupid way as the CAGW crowd to make the point.
The accident statistics can be seen in
http://www.caithnesswindfarms.co.uk/accidents.pdf
Really he wasn’t nearly inventive enough you could have included the manufacture of the wind turbines that would have added quite a few more fatalities.
“wind power kills about 0.9 people per terawatt-hour.”
Which bit isn’t killed ???
Looking at the absolute numbers of deaths from natural disaster graphs…..
The biggest spike on the graph is about 3.6 million in 1930. The global population around 1930 was about 2 billion so the rate of deaths was about 0.002.
The worst spike in the 21st century is about 300,000 when the population is about 7.3 billion. S the rate works out at about 0.00004.
So in approximately 100 years the population increased by 3.5x and the death rate due to natural disasters declined by about 50x. And that despite a more densely populated planet making the probability of exposure to any single event much higher.
Things are definitely getting better!
The chart they leave out is debt. So much of that increase in well being has been bought on credit. Over and over in human history the collapse of a credit bubble has led to political upheaval and violence. Today we have a worldwide burden of debt without parallel in human history.
Stay tuned.
We also have increases in worker productivity without parallel in human history. So it may not be as bad as you think. That said, we do need to stop writing checks that our economies can’t cash. Unfortunately I don’t see the public, or corrupt governments, refraining from voting themselves largess from the public treasury any time soon.
Strange how rip tides are not only the deadliest “weather” related death pre-WW2, but it’s even stranger that that’s the lengthiest dataset they have. Were the 1920s and 30s too inconvenient to graph the data for?
~5,000 people died in the U.S. from the 1936 heat wave alone, that is about 39 people per million, it would be off their graph 6 times.
It would be nice to see Julian Simon mentioned, as the guy who invented this approach and developed the argument against the Greens in the 1960s and 1970s…
TED talk by Hans Rosling on this topic is really worth a look. Definitely worth a search.
That’s hardly news. Why, I just saw this information as headlines this morning in the NYTimes and the Washington Post! /sarc
I would argue that the progress happened in spite of the increasing debt, not because of it. We did not ‘pay’ for the progress with debt. We created progress with imagination, innovation, risk taking and hard work. I t would have happened regardless of the debt load, and might have been even greater with smaller debt. I do agree that an economic collapse because of our ever-growing debt would have a very negative impact on our progress, at least for a short time. It could be much longer if governments try to ‘fix’ it.
Edwin commented: December 8, 2017 at 6:56 am “….The bottom line is the greens now allied with the radical socialist care about the climate only so far as it stops capitalism…..”
That’s the whole AGW scare in a nutshell. Conservation gave way to Ecology then make an unholy alliance with the Socialists/Marxists because they pretended to be of common feather. The Greens prove to be easy to control, prone to anarchy, and useful idiots of the highest order.
It is relevant that real problems are declining and at the same time alarmists have increased their cries. Some people just have to worry about something. More & more, real problems are less of a worry so a new source of worry fills the vacuum- in this case. CAGW
Look what that damned white patriarchy did… The nerve.
If you want a more detailed treatment of this sort of data read Matt Ridley’s The Rational Optimist. Published in 2010, I think he was ahead of his time vis a vis, the continuous improvement of the human condition.
Does anyone doubt that if the data were available to plot the deaths from all of the different weather events on the US weather event graph they would be up near where death from lightning is? I have no doubt that the deaths from heat and cold and hurricanes would be up there.
For years I was a volunteer on my counties Cemetery Commission. There were five of us and we got $10,000 to $15,000 dollars to use to identify and restore Pioneer cemeteries and restore existing ones. Then they were turned over to the Township trustees for maintenance. Doing that work really brought out just how high the mortality rate for infants and children really was back in the 18th, 19th, and early 20th century. It was also pretty high for women. Many a man had 3 or 4 wives during their lifetimes and all of them considerably younger than they were when the married.
I quit when the politics got to be a miserable hassle but we did one heck of a lot of good work during the 8 years I was involved. That is if one believes that ancestors should be honored for the legacy they left for us to enjoy and that cemeteries are a valuable historical record for those that wish to trace their family history.
Regarding the Tip, I don’t see Steve McIntyre’s comments much but I should visit Climate Audit more often.
Steve’s “Ohio Paper” was one of the first things a read after we got a DSL connection.
Greetings to him and AW.
I have been a fan of ourworldindata.org for a while. That and Gapminder as well.
Most people on the left see personal stories but miss the macro level. They want socialism to make the poor rich, totally missing the very basic fact that capitalism already does that.
The problem is that it hurt the middle class at the same time. Now it is time for us to prioritize western families.
Regarding the last chart, the one labelled Absolute number of annual global deaths from natural disasters:
“Death by extreme temperature” – is that extreme cold, extreme heat or both. Also, it’s represented by an orange band, but I can only see an orange band on the last two bars, 2000-2009, 20010-2015. None for the Dirty ’30s? None for all the heat waves over the last century in Europe and India and other areas of the world?
The graphs only show the human condition. What about the condition of life as a whole, all species included? Human progress at the cost of life? If you kill the context of life only a lie will survive.
New Amazon Species Discovered Every Other Day
https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/08/amazon-brazil-new-species-discovered-spd/
New species or an adapted one because of changed living conditions?
Or just one Man never noticed before?
What is surving: the human condition or the technological gadgets? Take away technology, turn off the power and look what remains of the human condition for the better. Our progress is mere dependency that shows itself as an array of many different chronic symptoms. These symptoms are treated with more technology – thus more dependency and on and on it goes, the merry-go-round of the human condition.
Every species that does not go extinct has some natural adaptation that it is completely dependent on to survive. For humans it is our brain. We are tool makers, and as such our survival is dependent on our tools. So what is so bad about that? It has made us the dominant species on the planet. Be happy that you are not shivering in the dark hoping that some big animal will not eat you today.
@ur momisugly Paul Penrose
There is no problem with tool-making. Every living being is a tool for life to keep life going and the biosphere stable enough. The only problem with human progress is our way to use energy. As long as we humans use energy quite differently than any other species, there will be problems we think must be solved with more technology.
By the way – the one and only graph that is missing above is the rise of taxation, in lockstep with our progress. And where there is more taxation debt is indeed the source.
I doubt the data on nuclear power. Coal is the input to thermal power, similarly uranium is the input to nuclear power. The mining pollution includes several types health hazard pollutants to tail pond carry for years the pollution, the processing ore and fuel has severe hazards — that is mining to processes. If we look at the data over different countries, this is far more hazardous than over coal based.
We are always happy to eat food served to us. We rarely look at the reality of ingredients used in the preparation of that food. Here the issue of pollution and health hazards and health bills play main role.
Dr. S. Jeevananda Reddy
Hans Rosling, R.I.P.
A master at presenting this information with the optimism it deserves.
What happened to the red China bubble in 1959? Chairman Mao. Let’s not do that again.
“Even after the Hiroshima bomb, radiation was back to background in less than a year and is now a thriving city.” Not entirely a fair comparison as there was only 60kg of fissile material in the bomb, compared to many tons in a reactor.
The main safety problems with present generation nuclear reactors are the use of pressurized primary coolants and inflammable fuel rod containers. A design which eliminated these would be a quantum improvement in safety.
Meanwhile the waste disposal problems mainly arise from the fact that fission products poison the fuel long before its useful energy has been extracted. This gives rise to a stockpile of notionally ‘spent’ fuel. The best resolution to this is to use liquid fuel which can more easily be reprocessed to remove the fission products.You thus reduce the waste problem by by least two orders of magnitude, and similarly increase the lifespan of available fuel stocks.
“Not entirely a fair comparison” ???
Here you compare elephants with mice: fissile uranium material for a commercial reactor is enriched to ~3%.
Natural uranium comprises ~ 0.7% fissionable material. Bomb-grade, ~93%. “Spent” fuel rods could be fuel for molten-salt Thorium reactors.
Radiation Doses From Natural And Artificial Sources.
Blood……………………………………………………………………………….20 mrem/year
Building Materials………………………………………………………………35 mrem/year
Food…………………………………………………………………………………25 mrem/year
Soil……………………………………………………………………………………11 mrem/year
Cosmic Rays (sea level)………………………………………………………35 mrem/year
Cosmic Rays (Denver altitude)………………………………………………70 mrem/year
Medical X-Rays………………………………………………………………….100 mrem/year
Air Travel (New York to LA round trip)……………………………………….5 mrem
Nuclear power plant (limit, at property line)………………………………..5 mrem/year
NUCLEAR POWER PLANTS (DOSE TO GENERAL PUBLIC)…0.01 mrem/year
Average annual dose (general public US)………………………………270 mrem/year
Table taken from book by PhD nuclear engineer Robert Zubrin, who has 9 patents to his name or pending.
Zubrin makes many references to the great work of Julian Simon, the economist who made fools of both Paul Ehrlich & John Holdren, doomsters & anti-humanists in chief. Simon’s The Ultimate Resource 2 is a must-read for anyone interested in the facts & figures behind the false & hijacked “environmentalist” movements.
Great reads also are Matt Ridley’s The Rational Optimist & Bjorn Lomborg’s Cool It.
Not a cheerful read, Zubrin’s 2013 book: Merchants of Despair, Radical Environmentalists, Criminal Pseudo-Scientists and the Fatal Cult of Antihumanism, details the anti-development & genocidal policies of the so-called “Green” movements, Communists & Govts around the world, which are based on the proven idiocies of the barbarian Malthus & the racist Darwin.
John Doran.
I’d like to see how much these have dropped since 1900. Anyone have those numbers?
Bob Clark
A maternal great-uncle was an X-ray pioneer and introduced that technology in the early 20th century to New Zealand. A life-long pipe smoker, his death was of course listed as smoking-related, even though he was careless with radiation shielding for most of his long professional life and must have just about glowed in the dark when he died in his nineties
Meanwhile the £££££$$$$$ hungry charities with their £4000 per week paid executives STILL bombard us with adverts about “donate to save the…” starving in Africa, children, refugees, polobears, etc…
Still… i guess they have to pay those OxygenWaster CEOs…
Very curious about the source data used for the “Death rates from energy production per TWh” chart.
1. Nuclear is typified by highly intermittent accidents. If this data is based on one particularly quiet year, that would normally be a “fair” comparison to the other forms of energy production but it would nonetheless lead to an inaccurate result. On the other hand, if they calculated all rates over the life of the technology, the death rates for traditional sources would be penalized for the lack of pollution controls which simply did not exist long ago.
2. How exactly are they attributing “deaths related to air pollution impacts”? It’s not as though that’s a listed cause of death on the coroners’ forms. How much of that assessment is data and how much is extrapolation from computer models? Since by their own footnote, it makes up “greater than 99% of the total”, that’s an awfully important factor.