Guest essay by Eric Worrall
According to a new United Nations report, “It is baffling that we willingly and knowingly continue to sow the seeds of our own destruction, despite the science and evidence that we are turning our only home into an uninhabitable hell for millions of people.”. But like many UN efforts this latest report appears to ignore evidence which contradicts their climate narrative.
Human cost of disasters
An overview of the last 20 years 2000 to 2019
GENEVA, 12 October 2020 – A UN report published to mark the International Day for Disaster Risk Reduction on October 13, confirms how extreme weather events have come to dominate the disaster landscape in the 21st century.
In the period 2000 to 2019, there were 7,348 major recorded disaster events claiming 1.23 million lives, affecting 4.2 billion people (many on more than one occasion) resulting in approximately US$2.97 trillion in global economic losses.
This is a sharp increase over the previous twenty years. Between 1980 and 1999, 4,212 disasters were linked to natural hazards worldwide claiming approximately 1.19 million lives and affecting 3.25 billion people resulting in approximately US$1.63 trillion in economic losses.
Much of the difference is explained by a rise in climate-related disasters including extreme weather events: from 3,656 climate-related events (1980-1999) to 6,681 climate-related disasters in the period 2000-2019.
The last twenty years has seen the number of major floods more than double, from 1,389 to 3,254, while the incidence of storms grew from 1,457 to 2,034. Floods and storms were the most prevalent events.
The report “The Human Cost of Disasters 2000-2019” also records major increases in other categories including drought, wildfires and extreme temperature events. There has also been a rise in geo-physical events including earthquakes and tsunamis which have killed more people than any of the other natural hazards under review in this report.
Mami Mizutori, the UN Secretary-General’s Special Representative for Disaster Risk Reduction, said today: “We are willfully destructive. That is the only conclusion one can come to when reviewing disaster events over the last twenty years. COVID-19 is but the latest proof that political and business leaders are yet to tune in to the world around them.
“Disaster management agencies, civil protection departments, fire brigades, public health authorities, the Red Cross and Red Crescent, and many NGOs are fighting an uphill battle against an ever-rising tide of extreme weather events. More lives are being saved but more people are being affected by the expanding climate emergency. Disaster risk is becoming systemic with one event overlapping and influencing another in ways that are testing our resilience to the limit. The odds are being stacked against us when we fail to act on science and early warnings to invest in prevention, climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction.
“Good disaster risk governance depends on political leadership and delivery on the promises made when the Paris Agreement and the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction were adopted five years ago. The report is a reminder to UN Member States of their commitment to strengthen disaster risk governance and to have national and local strategies for disaster risk reduction in place by 2020. This is a key target of the global blueprint for reducing disaster losses, the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, which was adopted at a World Conference in 2015. So far, 93 countries have put national strategies in place.”
Professor Debarati Guha-Sapir, Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters, University of Louvain, Belgium, said: “This report covers the first twenty years of this century and does not include biological hazards like COVID-19 but it clearly highlights the level of human suffering and economic loss that result from failure to adapt to climate change and to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. If this level of growth in extreme weather events continues over the next twenty years, the future of mankind looks very bleak indeed.
“We will have to live with the consequences of existing levels of climate change for a long time to come and there are many practical measures that can be taken to reduce the burden of disaster losses especially on low and middle-income countries that lack resources and are most exposed to economic losses on a scale that undermines their efforts to eradicate poverty and to provide good quality social services including health and education.”
KEY STATISTICS: 2000-2019
The statistics in this report are from the Emergency Events Database (EM-DAT) maintained by the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED) which records disasters which have killed ten or more people; affected 100 or more people; resulted in a declared state of emergency; or a call for international assistance.
Asia suffered the highest number of disaster events. In total, between 2000 and 2019, there were 3,068 disaster events in Asia, followed by the 1,756 events in the Americas and 1,192 events in Africa.
In terms of affected countries globally, China (577 events) and the USA (467 events) reported the highest number of disaster events, followed by India (321 events), Philippines (304 events), and Indonesia (278 events). These countries all have large and heterogenous landmasses and relatively high population densities in at-risk areas.
Overall, eight of the top 10 countries by disaster events are in Asia.
The years 2004, 2008, and 2010 stand out most, having had over 200,000 deaths each. The largest single event by death toll was the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami, 226,400 deaths; the second largest event occurred in 2010, when a 7.0 Richter earthquake struck Haiti in the middle of the night, killing approximately 222,000 people and leaving millions homeless. In 2008, Cyclone Nargis killed over 138,000 people in Myanmar. The average number of deaths worldwide from 2000 to 2019 was approximately 60,000 deaths per year. Since 2010 there have been no mega-disasters (100,000 deaths) and no single year with over 35,000 deaths. A link to the full report is here
Read more: https://www.undrr.org/news/drrday-un-report-charts-huge-rise-climate-disasters
The quote about “an uninhabitable hell” comes from the first page of the report.
When you delve into the report it gets more interesting. Most of the flooding, the main disaster cited, appears to be happening in China.
2.1 Floods
Floods have accounted for 44% of all disaster events from 2000 to 2019, affecting 1.6 billion people worldwide, the highest figure for any disaster type (Figure 9). Furthermore, floods are the most common type of event with an average of 163 events per year.
The most affected country by flooding in the past two decades was China, which experienced an average of 20 floods per year. Flooding in China affected a total of 900 million people over the two decades, accounting for approximately 55% of people affected by flooding worldwide. India is the 2nd most affected country by floods: it experienced an average of 17 flood events per year and had a total of approximately 345 million people affected. The deadliest flooding events from 2000 to 2019 were the June 2013 floods in India (6,054 deaths), May 2004 floods in Haiti (2,665 deaths), and the July 2010 floods in Pakistan (1,985 deaths).
Floods have the highest impacts in Asia, as the continent experienced 41% of all flooding events and with a total of 1.5 billion people affected, accounted for 93% of people affected by floods worldwide. Africa (763 flood events) and the Americas (680 flood events) experience significant flooding impacts as well. Many of these impacts are preventable since flooding, unlike most types of disasters, has affordable mechanisms of primary prevention, such as dams, dykes and drainage systems.
The problem with the report is there is no evidence human caused climate change is causing major changes in rainfall, vs the alternative explanation of natural variation. The following study, published in 2018 by the Chinese Academy of Science, mostly attributes shifting Chinese rainfall patterns to natural variation.
Attribution of extreme precipitation in the lower reaches of the Yangtze River during May 2016
Chunxiang Li1, Qinhua Tian2, Rong Yu3, Baiquan Zhou4,8, Jiangjiang Xia1, Claire Burke5, Buwen Dong6, Simon F B Tett7, Nicolas Freychet7, Fraser Lott5 and Andrew Ciavarella5Hide full author list
Abstract
May 2016 was the third wettest May on record since 1961 over central eastern China based on station observations, with total monthly rainfall 40% more than the climatological mean for 1961–2013. Accompanying disasters such as waterlogging, landslides and debris flow struck part of the lower reaches of the Yangtze River. Causal influence of anthropogenic forcings on this event is investigated using the newly updated Met Office Hadley Centre system for attribution of extreme weather and climate events. Results indicate that there is a significant increase in May 2016 rainfall in model simulations relative to the climatological period, but this increase is largely attributable to natural variability. El Niño years have been found to be correlated with extreme rainfall in the Yangtze River region in previous studies—the strong El Niño of 2015–2016 may account for the extreme precipitation event in 2016. However, on smaller spatial scales we find that anthropogenic forcing has likely played a role in increasing the risk of extreme rainfall to the north of the Yangtze and decreasing it to the south.
Read more: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa9691
The reliance on reported damage figures also appears to ignore human factors w/r to flooding, such as China’s dreadful track record of substandard dam construction. China has even been exporting substandard dam misery abroad, such as the notorious Ecuador Dam China constructed at the base of the earthquake prone Revantador Volcano.
I suspect it would suit China’s government very well to have the recent floods blamed on Climate Change, because a lot of questions are quietly being asked right now inside China, about the utter failure of the Chinese Government’s massive investment in flood control. But the truth is there is no firm evidence climate change is making anything worse.
In my opinion the UNDRR and their sensationalist attempt to blame humans for what is likely an expression of natural variation, is evidence of yet another UN agency which is not fit for purpose.
Update (EW): Updated the description of the Chinese Academy of Science Report.
See?–we are not one bit better than 1894 as far as being buried in mountains of horse manure.
Black… brown matter or fudging. It’s routine to inject this particulate matter into political, social, and professional environments when the climate is unfavorable to a cause, a special or peculiar interest, and is needed to force a consensus with a preferred reality. Oh, an wash your hands. Fecal/oral transmission may be the primary transmission mode of social and viral contagion.
One thing is increasing: The amount of Green Porn to which we are subjected…
But over 100 years there is no increase.
Cherry-picked dates as usual in Climate Scientology.
Agree, this is just so much garbage….seriously…..
Well, it is sor5t of true…if you take every CO2 climate change disaster (ZERO) and double it, you still get ZERO. So I have to give them an “A” for effort but “F” for honesty.
I am ignoring all the Wind Turbine and solar farms they built because they have yet to become environmental disasters…just economic ones.
I’m not so sure. Those Chinese built blades keep falling off. Just one at 200mph will cause a lot of carnage one day.
If it’s so uninhabitable, why has population risen from 4.4 billion in 1980 to 7.8 billion in 2020.
Is the population increase zombies?
Good point, and a candy bar used to be a nickel.
The claim is that we are making the world uninhabitable for milliions, not that we have already.
The biggest issue I have with these clods is that we could be making places “habitable” that are now “uninhabitable” for millions of people that are suffering now, and they seem to think that down on the list from the priority of protecting their beachfront properties.
“The claim is that we are making the world uninhabitable for milliions, not that we have already.”
But that’s just it. For decades now, catastrophe was just a few years away. But now they say we are in the middle of a climate crisis. But there’s still no evidence, just emotion.
better tell Roger Pielke JR
Roger Pielke jnr has completely detroyed this report on twitter.
https://twitter.com/RogerPielkeJr/status/1315668348173131776
Those would be disasters of the political and economic climates. Yes, for sure, they are far more frequent.
US out of UN!
UN out of US!
+1 When will the USA understand the UN acts like an enemy?
Amen
uh uh. Keep your friends close, your enemies closer.
Or defund them.
What about underreporting in previous years due to poorer communications, especially in China and Asia, urbanization which causes more flood events, and lack of funds and lower investment in infrastructure relative to GDP to prevent or reduce flooding in poorer countries, such as in Asia? Even attempts to account for these effects are usually poorly handled, or just completely ignored. Specifically, U.S. EF0-2 tornadoes were poorly represented in prior decades; I know, I attempted to verify these while writing for Storm Data. These years, every whirlwind is reported in many Storm Data jurisdiction’s statistics.
Pray tell, and what dominated the disaster landscape before that? Curious minds want to know.
We had lots of sci-fi and disaster movies. That should fill that part of the ticket, shouldn’t it?
And they then go to list the top two disasters as a tsunami and an earthquake!
Hardly climate related.
Remove the deaths from just these two non-climate events and the death toll DECLINED. It declined despite the huge increase in population. These dishonest idiots are obviously perpetuating a lie to further their crooked wealth distribution scam.
“Curious minds want to know.”
World wars.
(hehe, I originally typed it as “warts”, works either way)
In the past, millions of people could die in China or India and there would be not report. Nowadays even minor events are widely reported. The ‘doubling’ of disaster is simply due to the doubling of reports of disasters.
In reality, natural disasters are getting slightly less, as with hurricanes, where even minor depressions get named. This is yet another fraudulent report from a fraudulent organisation that used to be known as the United Nations. In reality, disaster are getting rarer but damages are getting more costly.
The yangtze flood of 1931drowned 150000 people and 2 million died in the aftermath. Virtually unknown to most MSM journalists. According to the Web droughts and floods had been increasing in China since the 19th century. I think that during WW2 there was a famine in India, kept quiet by the British then and ever since.
During 1666 Samuel Pepys reported a heatwave which was similar to that of 1976 in temperature and duration. 1976 despite what Griff says has not been surpassed in the UK since.
Modern communications mean there isn’t an event anywhere in the world where there are people that doesn’t get onto social media as it happens, looking back on my life there are very local weather events that didn’t get onto the front page of the Perthshire Advertiser which would now be on STV evening news
The man made element to the Famine in India was that Churchill could have done something to at least alleviate the ’43 Famine and the shocking fact that whilst the Irish died in the potato Famine agricultural produce was available and indeed being exported it was just that the peasants could not afford them.
What exactly, is the process by which a 1C (or less) rise over one hundred years leads to increased flooding?
I’ve heard the tired old ”there is more energy in the system” meme. But one degree? How much difference in degrees is there between the various systems causing the flooding?
I don’t buy it.
According to the second law of thermodynamics, there isn’t more energy in the system.
How much more “energy” was in the system during the Holocene Optimum.
And I’m sure someone has asked WHY they compare to a tiny 20 year period instead of looking at past floods, especially in China. !
Can’t be cherry-picking the period to compare to, can it?
Great to see there was no CO2 climate effect in the period 1980-1999, though, even though, according to GISS, the global temperature climbed rapidly 🙂
fred please correct me if I’m wrong but I believe that this report is seriously flawed. Yeah I know, Duh!
Two things.
1. They base their classification of an extreme weather event on 10 or more people dying, or more than 100 people being affected. They have nominated these numbers based on today’s population. If we go back two hundred years and establish the population of the time, those exact same storms would never have been classified as severe weather events because there were fewer people. Using their same methodology for that time, because there were fewer people, fewer people would have died and fewer would have been affected. Based on their methodology, there would have been severe weather events that would never have been recorded because there were no people to be affected.
That’s why Australia doesn’t rate on their top ten list for this report. We get our share of extreme weather events, but because our continent is so very big and at 25 million our population is quite small, fewer people are affected. We don’t come up on their radar, in this regard anyway.
2. They like to talk about the increasing dollar value of damage done by the ‘increasing’ catastrophes. Well, the same principle applies as with the above scenario. There was less infrastructure to be damaged two hundred years ago, and what there was would have been spread out. Spreading the risk so to speak. In more recent times, major infrastructure is concentrated in large and densely populated areas, and lots of them. We didn’t have cars two hundred years ago either, among many other things obviously.
The number of billions or trillions of dollars lost in these severe weather events is absolutely irrelevant! All that means is that a lot more material possessions, owned or built buy a lot more people, some of whom are very wealthy, was destroyed.
The weather events haven’t changed, it’s just that more people are affected. The severe weather events don’t care who or what’s in the way, they’re just doing what they’ve always done. There’s simply more infrastructure and people.
And just as an aside, we have been lied to or mislead so many times, why would we believe some of these figures anyway? Are we really going to get accurate figures out of China? Or India for that matter.
In regard to tsunamis, earthquakes and volcanic activity, how are deaths and damage associated with them classified as weather events? What am I missing here? Because the number of deaths and the damage associated with them are quite large numbers. Is it somehow valid that they are included. Well, even if for some reason it’s valid then the same scenario applies as to the two previous examples.
Instead of wasting trillions on renewables, batteries and EV’s, thereby further trashing the planet, we should be spending it in more practical ways. They need to get people in there with fresh ideas and common sense.
Evidence is not proof. There is absolutely no proof that the current weather is anything that hasn’t happened before and won’t happen again. It is as if they are reporting from a roller coaster, and every time it is going up, it is ‘evidence’ that they are going up. Of COURSE they are going up – they just forget to mention when they are going down.
There are world-wide cold records being set regularly – you do not hear of them because they do not support the narrative. Soon, however, it will be impossible to ignore the cold. The cold is what to really be afraid of, as it can cause crop failures and massive migrations to places that cannot support them.
The current warmth has made earth more productive than it has ever been – that won’t last.
The left out tornadoes.
Gee, I wonder why.
But they added earth quakes. Gee I wonder why!
But what does their own IPCC say about weather disasters ?
Ok I see how this works. More CO2 in the US reduces disasters here and more CO2 in China increases disasters there. We should shut off the wind mills and solar farms in the US and sell them all to the Chinese for their own safety.
This is more bafflegab to attempt to distract from the real issue which is an unbridled lie to trick those easily fooled into giving up their freedoms.
The report “The Human Cost of Disasters 2000-2019” also records major increases in other categories including drought, wildfires and extreme temperature events. There has also been a rise in geo-physical events including earthquakes and tsunamis which have killed more people than any of the other natural hazards under review in this report. – article
These are natural disasters, aren’t they? All occurred essentially on their own (not counting wildfires set by Very Bad People), and would have happened with or without the presence of Hoomans, as happened during the Silurian and Carboniferous eras/epochs/whatevers, and there were no Hoomans present to upset any apple carts,
So the real problem is not the disasters themselves, but the fact that they happened, which upsets these apple carts?
Seriously, these people really do need therapy, and after their daily sessions, a quiet little room with milk and cookies and some comic books like Little Lulu and Donald Duck and maybe Nancy & Sluggo.
The report “The Human Cost of Disasters 2000-2019” also records major increases in other categories including drought, wildfires and extreme temperature events. There has also been a rise in geo-physical events including earthquakes and tsunamis which have killed more people than any of the other natural hazards under review in this report.” – see, this makes it quite plain that these extreme events, which include quakes and Very Large Destructive Waves, are completely out of the control of the reportees (not reporters) and the mere idea that they can’t tell the planet and Mother Nature what to do is more than they are able to absorbe.
Most of us will simply get out of the way and let Ma Nature/Gaia do her thing, but these guys think they can manager that old gal? Really? Is their acquaintance with the Real World truly that deficient? If that’s the case, they are truly sad creatures.
Just askin’. We’re supposed to have some cold weather in a few days, here in my kingdom, about a week ahead of when we usually get it. Time to make cornbread, a good thick pot of soup, and some cookies.
UN: Climate = Weather… except when it doesn’t.
Hilarious. I mean – genuinely smile-making claptrap. I thought at first that this was a WUWT spoof. But no, the UNDRR – United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction really does exist.
Some nice observations here from readers. I particularly appreciated those relating to the increase in world population (how did THAT happen in an increasingly ‘uninhabitable’ world?). But then these po-faced idiots invite a risible response. Just think, this ridiculous UNDRR office and its useless bureaucrats are being funded by – you and me.
And as for climate disasters – in a short few thousand years, the ice will be groaning two miles thick above the crushed remains of the UN building. Now that really will be a climate catastrophe to get our attention.
“The most affected country by flooding in the past two decades was China, which experienced an average of 20 floods per year.”
Serves ’em right to suffer:
It’s worse than we thought. Ridd’s brilliant work about the GBR has been blatantly ignored by the Australian media, again!
https://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/there-is-no-time-to-lose-great-barrier-reef-has-lost-half-its-corals-20201013-p564tx.html
The UN reported: “There has also been a rise in geo-physical events including earthquakes and tsunamis which have killed more people than any of the other natural hazards under review in this report.”
So how does the CO2 knob also control earthquakes?
Translated from the f-wittery:
It is baffling – no it isn’t if you have an independently thinking brain
that we willingly and knowingly continue to sow the seeds of our own destruction – no we don’t. There is no destruction.
despite the science and evidence – there is none
that we are turning our only home into an uninhabitable hell for millions of people – total crap. Where’s any evidence for this garbage?
ABJECT FAIL – don’t even bother trying again.
If you read the report you will find their 4 criteria for declaring the event a disaster, any one of which by itself qualifies the event for the disaster rating. The 3rd criteria is “More than 100 people are affected”.
“Mommy they’ve closed all the schools for today because of the snow storm.” Yeah – serious s..t man. Living on the Canadian prairies there were “disasters” each and every week in the winter. Do we laugh or cry?
The big disaster, a tsunami after an earthquake, on best present knowledge has absolutely no connection to burning fossil fuels.
Why are so many authors telling huge, transparent lies these days?
Here in Melbourne, Australia, we have had an inquiry into deficiencies of a quarantine scheme to prevent virus spread. Many of those giving evidence failed to be honest and straight forward. They were Ministers or bureaucrats who are now telling us in broadcasts to be honest citizens when they question us – or face punishment. Geoff S
In the past 70 years, the world population has tripled. It was 2.5 billion back in 1950 and is now 0ver 7.5 billion.
With that increase in voices reporting the affect of disasters it would be remarkable if there was not an increase in people affected by disasters, what ever the prime cause!!
Is the UN actively engaged in fear mongering? If it is, why are they so fixated in their crusade to inject anxiety? They could be the champions and progress meaningful technologies that can help alleviate the suffering of those affected by natural disasters?
Because they want an un-elected one-world government.
According to the GWPF, the data in the report does not support their conclusions.
https://www.thegwpf.com/un-disasters-report-is-a-huge-blunder-and-embarrassment/
They’re not even trying to hide their “climate apocalypse” lies, this report is unbelievable, shameful even.
“2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami, 226,400 deaths; 2010, when a 7.0 Richter earthquake struck Haiti, killing approximately 222,000 people”
Those 448,400 deaths were caused by earthquakes, which I’d hazard a guess had sweet FA to do with CO².
Oh and let’s not forget that the UN made things worse in Haiti by introducing Cholera and their world renowned abuse of women and children.
Disband this sick and corrupt organisation now.
“Many of these impacts are preventable since flooding, unlike most types of disasters, has affordable mechanisms of primary prevention, such as dams, dykes and drainage systems.”
Well there you go. In writing. Green Policy preventing dams causes disasters that could have otherwise been prevented.
Save the world, kids. Reject a Green. The UN said so.
50% of those were literally people building houses in a floodplain, right?
Yup, just woke up and read the title but the comment above the comment window is *Craig from Oz*.
Flooding isn’t a climate disaster, its a zoning disaster.
This UN “report” is a disaster.
So 1.19 million people died in natural disasters from 1980-2000. With an average population of 5.28 billion in that time period this represents 0.0225% of the population.
From 2000-2020 1.23 million people died in natural disasters from 2000-2020. With an average population of 6.94 billion in that time period this represents 0.0177% of the population.
Therefore the headline should read “Percentage of world’s population killed by natural disasters has DECREASED by over 20% in the last 40 years”.
The UN report reads like propaganda with all its hyperbole.
And that’s all it is.
It would be all but impossible for natural disasters (extreme weather events) to have changed in any consistent manner when global temperature (what CO2 is likely to affect) hasn’t changed in any consistent manner.
https://youtu.be/b1cGqL9y548?t=15m56s
The last IPCC report could not draw a solid connection between climate change and sever weather events. That has a been a big problem for AGW scaremongers, as it was easy to cite that. (Not that the MSM listened or reported it, but it was useful for speaking with reasonable people.) Looks like they’re going to fix that next time, and this is the first step.
This was better then?
What’s Natural
By Jim Steele
Extreme scientists and politicians warn we will suffer catastrophic climate change if the earth’s average temperature rises 2.7°F above the Little Ice Age average. They claim we are in a climate crisis because average temperature has already warmed by 1.5°F since 1850 AD. Guided by climate fear, politicians fund whacky engineering schemes to shade the earth with mirrors or aerosols to lower temperatures. But the cooler Little Ice Age endured a much more disastrous climate.
The Little Ice Age coincides with the pre-industrial period. The Little Ice Age spanned a period from 1300 AD to 1850 AD, but the exact timing varies. It was a time of great droughts, retreating tree lines, and agricultural failures leading to massive global famines and rampant epidemics. Meanwhile advancing glaciers demolished European villages and farms and extensive sea ice blocked harbors and prevented trade.
Dr. Michael Mann who preaches dire predictions wrought by global warming described the Little Ice Age as a period of widespread “famine, disease, and increased child mortality in Europe during the 17th–19th century, probably related, at least in part, to colder temperatures and altered weather conditions.” In contrast to current models suggesting global warming will cause wild weather swings, Mann concluded “the Little Ice Age may have been more significant in terms of increased variability of the climate”. Indeed, historical documents from the Little Ice Age describe wild climate swings with extremely cold winters followed by very warm summers, and cold wet years followed by cold dry years.
A series of Little Ice Age droughts lasting several decades devastated Asia between the mid 1300s and 1400s. Resulting famines caused significant societal upheaval within India, China, Sri Lanka, and Cambodia. Bad weather resulted in the Great Famine of 1315-1317 which decimated Europe causing extreme levels of crime, disease, mass death, cannibalism and infanticide. The North American tree-ring data reveal megadroughts lasting several decades during the cool 1500s. The Victorian Great Drought from 1876 to 1878 brought great suffering across much of the tropics with India devastated the most. More than 30 million people are thought to have died at this time from famine worldwide.
The Little Ice Age droughts and famines forced great societal upheaval, and the resulting climate change refugees were forced to seek better lands. But those movements also spread horrendous epidemics. Wild climate swings brought cold and dry weather to central Asia. That forced the Mongols to search for better grazing. As they invaded new territories they spread the Bubonic plague which had devastated parts of Asia earlier. In the 1300s the Mongols passed the plague to Italian merchant ships who then brought it to Europe where it quickly killed one third of Europe’s population. European explorers looking for new trade routes brought smallpox to the Americas, causing small native tribes to go extinct and decimating 25% to 50% of larger tribes. Introduced diseases rapidly reduced Mexico’s population from 30 million to 3 million.
By the 1700s a new killer began to dominate – accidental hypothermia. When indoor temperatures fall below 48°F for prolonged periods, the human body struggles to keep warm, setting off a series of reactions that causes stress and can result in heart attacks. As recently as the 1960s in Great Britain, 20,000 elderly and malnourished people who lacked central heating died from accidental hypothermia. As people with poor heating faced bouts of extreme cold in the 1700s, accidental hypothermia was rampant.
What caused the tragic climate changes of the Little Ice Age? Some scientists suggest lower solar output associated with periods of fewer sunspots. Increasing solar output then reversed the cooling and warmed the 20th century world. As solar output is now falling to the lows of the Little Ice Age, a natural experiment is now in progress testing that solar theory. However other scientists suggest it was rising CO2 that delivered the world from the Little Ice Age.
Increasing CO2 also has a beneficial fertilization effect that is greening the earth. The 20th century warming, whether natural or driven by rising CO2 concentrations, has lengthened the growing season. Famines are being eliminated. Tree-lines stopped retreating and trees are now reclaiming territory lost over the past 500 years. So why is it that now we face a climate crisis?
At the end of the 1300’s Great Famine and the Bubonic Plague epidemic, the earth sustained 350 million people. With today’s advances in technology and milder growing conditions, record high crop yields are now feeding a human population that ballooned to over 7.6 billion.
So, the notion that cooler times represent the “good old days” and we are now in a warmer climate crisis seems truly absurd.
Jim Steele is retired director of the Sierra Nevada Field Campus, SFSU
and authored Landscapes and Cycles: An Environmentalist’s Journey to Climate Skepticism
From 1 to 2? Or did they just change the definition? Or did the instruments just get more sensitive? Or did they just monitor a larger area? Or did they just make it up as they do with all their “facts”?
Donna Laframboise has a good commentary on the UN and disaster management.
—————————
UN on Disasters: Those Who Can’t Do, Scold
The United Nations, which failed to stop the coronavirus from spreading everywhere, and which introduced cholera to earthquake-devastated Haiti, releases a report on disaster management.
According to the UN, yesterday was International Day for Disaster Risk Reduction. A press release about a new report tells us that, between 1980 and 1999, natural disasters claimed an estimated 1.19 million lives. During the most recent 20-year period (2000 to 2019), 1.23 million lives were lost. The UN says this “sharp increase” can be blamed on climate change. But that’s just hyperbole and speculation.
Read the rest here;
https://nofrakkingconsensus.com/2020/10/14/un-on-disasters-those-who-cant-do-scold/
It is very normal for “flooding” to increase as populations increase and more land is levelled and drained for fields, housing developments, mosquito control, etc. The surge capacity of ponds and wetlands decline, and rainfalls that were once manageable become flood events. This usually occurs in conjunction with faulty infrastructure planning, so officials really like to be able to claim CC as a root cause.
As a civil engineer by training, flooding may indeed be COMPLETELY controlled by new [man-made] flood control works such as “dams, dykes and drainage systems,” EXCEPT:
(a) when society or those in charge of the Five-Year Plan object to the expenditure of money to combat such events (I’m aware of no “civilized” nation or state that predicts against ALL floods, though many communities along the Ohio River [e.g., Cincinnati] have built levies and floodway systems to protect against the highest flood level of modern history);
(b) detailed weather records of rainfall intensity, duration, and frequency are inadequate to the task of allowing an accurate prediction of NORMAL or EXTREME rainfall intensity and duration;
(c) government and society drive/allow/change land use in all manner or ways that makes no damn sense (no pun intended), leading to increased runoff rates and volumes, peak as well as average;
(d) we experience historic events such as Hurricane Harvey (of 2017 fame) stalling over Metro Houston and dumping an exceptional amount of rain while storm surge blocked the normal drainage system outfalls; (e) when there have been extensive changes in land-up and development (with attendant increases in impervious surfaces), and
(f) when corruption and mismanagement play into big dollar civil works contracts leaving crappy foundations and other flaws in the constructed system.
I’m sure I can come up with a few more.
Hmmmm….
Too bad UN’s own AR5 Climate Report, reluctantly admitted that over the past century, there haven’t been ANY discernible increasing trends in the severity and/or frequency of global: hurricanes, typhoons, cyclones, droughts, floods, tornadoes, thunderstorms and hailstorms…
Oops…
And Leftists become so incensed when we question the veracity of their absurd CAGW doom-and-gloom predictions…
They keep trotting out the exact same lies, just rearrange the words and punctuation and graphs, drop in different pics/vids. And they honestly do not understand why no one believes them.
“United nations office for disaster risk reduction. ”
If the risks are natural and not increasing, there is no reason for the office.