Wednesday 14 October 2020

"Natural disasters are turning the world into an uninhabitable hell"

From The Daily Mail:

The number of natural disasters around the world has doubled since the turn of the century, with climate change to blame according to the United Nations.

Speaking on Monday, the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction said 1.23 million people have been killed in natural disasters since 2000.

Around the world, 7,348 disasters including earthquakes, tsunamis and droughts have cost nearly $3 trillion, nearly double the numbers for the previous 20-year period.


That sounds a bit worrying, but is it really?

Remember that most 'natural disasters' are failures of town planning. If you build in areas prone to earthquakes, floods, forest fires or tornadoes; on cliff edges or unstable ground; if inequality is so extreme that people are forced to live in shanty towns on steep slopes or flood plains or do subsistence farming on marginal land (yes, it always boils down to land inequality...), then it's only a matter of time.

Although they try to pin this all on 'climate change', they state that "Geo-physical events such as earthquakes, tsunamis and volcanoes have killed more people than any of the other natural hazards reviewed". If more than half died as a result of "geophysical events"*, that brings the total deaths which might or might not have been caused by 'climate change' (rather than failures of town planning or land inequality) down to about 600,000 in about 7,000 events classified as natural disasters over 20 years.

That averages out at 350 events a year (or two per country per year) with 85 people dying in each event = 30,000 deaths per year. There are over seven billion people, about 100 million of whom die each year on average. The extra 30,000 deaths a year (slightly less than the number of road deaths in the USA each year) are nowhere near turning the world into an "uninhabitable hell", are they? And $3 trillion is a lot of money, but that averages out at $150 billion a year. Global GDP is about $80,000 billion a year, so the cost of sorting this all out is about 0.2% of global GDP or about $20 per person per year. And half of that is due to earthquakes and volcanoes.

* I think that's what they meant. The two biggest disasters were caused by earthquakes, which have nothing to do with 'climate change'. About 450,000 people died in the Boxing Day Tsunami and the Haiti earthquake (Haiti is an uninhabitable hell anyway, I believe, that's a political thing), with plenty of other earthquakes and volcanic eruptions which you've forgotten about that would bring up the total deaths to more than half the headline 1.23 million.

14 comments:

View from the Solent said...

Mark,
Just the first(?) brief analysis which points out that the UN's own data undermines their bovine excrement outpourings.

https://www.thegwpf.com/un-disasters-report-is-a-huge-blunder-and-embarrassment/

Mark Wadsworth said...

VFTS, yes, but GWPF are science deniers and climate deniers beholden to Big Oil etc :-)

Bayard said...

How many times do I have to tell you, Mark, you're not supposed to analyse these things, you are supposed to be afraid, chant the slogans and chastise the unbelievers.

Mark Wadsworth said...

B, my "science denialism" is largely based on the fact that most of what they say is lies and exaggeration and they don't understand the basic physics (starting with James Hansen's fudge, and they haven't really moved on from there).

So by reverse logic, it must all be nonsense. If there were strong evidence or argument to support it, then they'd just present it and leave it at that.

That said, I'm not ruling out MMGW as a valid theory, I've just never seen the required strong evidence or argument. If they could present some, then I might well be an Alarmist.

Lola said...

MW. Wot B ses. GW is not science. It's a 'faith'. And not a very good one.

Mark Wadsworth said...

L, to be honest, parts of me wants to Believe. The same way I'd rather slip into cozy Home-owner-ism and have done with this LVT malarkey. But having weighed up the evidence, I'm a Science Denier and a Georgist.

George Carty said...

MW 12:04

I've seen a claim that most of the money going into climate change denial organizations comes not from fossil fuel companies but from housing developers.

Bayard said...

GC, you mean Mark has been funded by housing developers all along and we never suspected? O tempora! O mores!

George Carty said...

Bayard, when I said "climate change denial organizations" I meant well-funded astroturf operations of course, not this humble blog. 😉

Although I suspect it would specifically be the builders of car-dependent suburban sprawl (and especially those who build on flood plains) that would put money into climate change denial...

Bayard said...

"well-funded astroturf operations"

Ah those. They do seem to me to be like the PWIM, something that is useful to cite in an argument, but which doesn't actually exist. All the blogs that point out the evident fallacies in "climate science" appear to be one-mn band operations like this one. Meanwhile, on the other side you have organisations like NASA, with its $22.629 billion budget.

Mark Wadsworth said...

GC, I'm with Bayard on this one.

The fairly evil Koch Brothers give some prominent climate sceptics money, that is true. Those people are ruining it for the grassroots science deniers like me who do it out of intellectual interest only.

Robin Smith said...

How many times do I have to tell you: you only have facts. Facts in a world where truth is less important than feelings

Do you want to reach your death bed before you recognise this?

Lola said...

MW You and I and the rest of us will continue with he heretic-ness then.

Mark Wadsworth said...

L, yes, the curse of looking at facts and logic :-)