Al Gore’s ‘24 hours of climate reality’ focused almost exclusively on extreme weather events. According to Gore and his movie, global warming is making extreme weather events more common and severe, resulting in a rapid acceleration of human misery and deadly weather events.
International humanitarian and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have also been vocal and insistent about the relationship between global warming and extreme weather. They argue that global warming will, among other negative consequences, exacerbate the frequencies of extreme weather events and increase the resulting death toll and economic losses.
Not so says Indur Goklany from the Reason Foundation. He took a decade-by-decade look at the number of deaths caused worldwide by extreme weather events from 1900 to 2010. Countering Gore’s claims, Goklany concludes, “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.” He adds, “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.” (1)
Some specifics:
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 (hurricanes, cyclones, tornadoes, typhoons), responsible for around 7% of extreme weather deaths from 1900-2008, declined by more than 55% since the 1970s.
To put the numbers in perspective, weather now ranks extremely low on life’s list of risks. Overall, weather caused less than one-tenth of all the deaths during the last decade. Car crashes, accidents, and violence are far more significant threats.
Ranking of 26 factors based on disability adjusted life years (DALYS) and mortality for 2000 revealed: Global warming ranked 22 out of 26 on the DALY list, and ranked 21 out of 26 on the mortality list.
This echoes an earlier study done by the Copenhagen Consensus, a group organized by Danish statistician Bjorn Lomborg. They looked at ways to address ten of the most serious challenges facing the world today: access to education, climate change, communicable diseases, conflicts, corruption and governance, financial stability, hunger and malnutrition, migration, sanitation and access to clear drinking water, subsidies and trade barriers. The group was asked to answer the question: What would be the best ways of advancing global welfare, and particularly the welfare of developing countries, supposing that an additional $50 billion of resources were at governments’ disposal? (2)
The results: Compared to other issues such as communicable diseases, malnutrition and hunger, sanitation and water, and the rest, climate change ranked last on the list.
All of this indicates that the total risk of death from all extreme weather events has been heavily oversold and that if we really want to save lives, money could be put to much better use alleviating problems in developing countries than directing it at ‘climate change.’
References
Indur M. Goklany, “Wealth and Safety: The Amazing Decline in Deaths From Extreme Weather in an Era of Global Warming, 1900-2010,” Reason Foundation, Policy Study 393, September 2011
Global Crisis, Global Solutions, Bjorn Lomborg, Editor, (Cambridge, Cambridge, University Press, 2004), 605
Jack Dini is author of Challenging Environmental Mythology. He has also written for American Council on Science and Health, Environment & Climate News, and Hawaii Reporter.
