There is a lot of talk about extreme weather these days, with many climate activists and media suggesting that deaths and injuries from extreme weather are increasing due to human-caused global warming.
However, the truth is very different:
Deaths from extreme weather are actually decreasing rapidly for several reasons.
You read that correctly: declining.
To illustrate, the figure below shows the number of global deaths from floods, droughts, storms, wildfires, and extreme temperatures from the 1920s to 2021, based on a respected international database.
Huge declines in deaths. And this is not including the fact that the population has increased immensely during the past century.
Thus, personal risk from extreme weather is going down even faster!.
(2) The ability to communicate threats is WAY better than 40 years ago, with people in even poor countries possessing smartphones that provide updated warnings.
There are several articles in the peer-reviewed literature that explicitly state this: warming temperatures will reduce extreme temperature deaths.
Hurricanes? The ability to forecast their track has become much, much better. At the same time, the frequency of major hurricanes has been stable as the Earth has warmed considerably during the past few decades.
Same thing with the number of landfalling storms. No upward trends as the planet warms.
Even with an immense increase in population in the coastal zone, the number of hurricane deaths from Atlantic hurricanes and tropical storms is nearly constant (see below). Thus, personal risk is immensely LESS.
I could discuss other forms of extreme weather, but the conclusions are the same:
Your personal risk from virtually any type of extreme weather is now much, much smaller than it has been historically.
We live with LESS risk of being killed or injured by extreme weather today, even as the planet slowly warms.
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ReplyDelete"Your personal risk from virtually any type of extreme weather is now much, much smaller than it has been historically."
ReplyDeleteIt just makes sense: Western societies have never been wealthier and healthier. And not by a trivial amount either. It's one of the best kept secrets of our time.
Wealthier maybe, but certainly not healthier. Western societies are on a road to slow suicide. 30+ years ago, we were a much healthier society.
DeleteI once saw a commentary piece out of Australia that tried to make a similar point about warming temperatures being a good thing because colder temperatures were more likely to cause medical distress and/or unnecessary deaths than warmer temperatures. I never fully believed it at the time, knowing that very warm temperatures (one need only look at that heatwave we had back in 2021) cam also medical distress and unnecessary deaths. What was not discussed in that commentary piece was the impacts of improved weather forecasting, improved communications, and better infrastructure. This post makes it quite clear that it is those factors that are making the real difference when it comes to lowering the death toll during extreme weather events, and not just the change in temperatures. Thank you, Professor for telling the full story!
ReplyDeleteAND those charts show the total number of deaths, irrespective of the world's population (which has increased substantially in the last 100 years). A chart showing global deaths relating to population (say, deaths per 100,000 people) would show an even greater decline.
ReplyDeleteSea level rise is not an extreme weather event. I’d like to know if it is a real climate change related phenomenon. If it is then is it not like the frog in the slowly heating pot? There is a great deal of population along the coast.
ReplyDeleteThe ongoing erosion that is taking place in Ocean Shores seems to be somewhat like the latter, even though erosion isn't an extreme weather event (although the worst of it does seem to occur during storms that coincidentally with King Tides, which can get rather wild).
DeleteI think you gave an incomplete accounting of the results from the cited Lancet (Gasparinni et al. 2015) paper. It makes clear that the impact of temperature on mortality is highly non-linear, with a far more rapid increase as temperatures exceed the minimum mortality temperature (MMT) than as when temperatures dip bellow. As a result, a few degree increase in the temperature of a day warmer than MMT will generally cause a far greater increase in mortality than the decreased mortality which results from increasing a the temperature of a day cooler than MMT. Therefore, despite nearly all locations having significantly more time bellow MMT than above (an hence cool weather contributing more to total mortality), one can not simply state that increasing the average temperature will decrease total mortality, as mortality appears to be far more sensitive to changes above MMT.
ReplyDeleteTo make actual predictions on changes in mortality rate, one would have to use the expected temperature histograms resultant from global warming in conjunction with the paper's calculated relative-mortality-risk as a function of temperature to calculate the new expected total mortality.
It just so happens that there is a 2020 working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research ("Valuing the Global Mortality Consequences of Climate Change Accounting for Adaptation Costs and Benefits", Carleton et al.) which has done just that. They estimate that with adaptation and income growth the average annual mortality increase per 100,000 will be 11 under RCP4.5 and 73 (comparable to all infectious diseases) under RCP8.5. I suppose it is notable that there analysis did not include more optimistic emission scenarios, but based on the work it seems reasonable to expect global warming to increase total mortality.
As an analogy for the dynamics at work here, consider deaths from driving cars and motorcycles. More people die every year while in cars than on motorcycles, however switching people from cars to motorcycles would NOT decrease the motor vehicle death rate, in fact quite the opposite. More people die in cars because far more people travel by car than motorcycle, but the death rate of motorcycles is far higher. It is easy to imagine a similar dynamic is at play with temperature, where shifting the temperature up causes more deaths even though more people are killed by cold temperatures.