What this is plausibly telling us is that we are all getting better at rebuilding. In fact today we have almost a global standard for housing driven by the example of condo towers. Builders prefer concrete everywhere. This alone lowers the death rate easily.
Recall the death rate for Haiti's earthquake. Same year, same size of quake in California and almost no one died and damage was contained and generally repairable, Literally night and day.
Even Katrina only killed several hundred. A century of planning and building prevented thousands from dying.
Perfect will never be possible, but it is all about the unlucky now. We do know enough to evacuate danger zones and we do see Hurricanes rising well enough in advance and this holds true for volcanos as well. The only event that vis a lot harder and we can still schieve early warning many minutes ahead and that can be good enough with all our tall buildings.
Are Extreme Weather Death Tolls Rising?
NOVEMBER 23, 2021
By Paul Homewood
Is it true, or did you hear it on the BBC?
More and more people are dying from extreme weather, right??
It must surely be true , because the BBC says it is, not to mention climate scientists.
“People are already dying and species are becoming extinct with current temperatures,"
Piers Forster – IPCC Lead Author
It’s all very strange though, because the BBC themselves said the opposite just two months ago!
The number of weather-related disasters to hit the world has increased five-fold over the past 50 years, says the World Meteorological Organization.
However, the number of deaths because of the greater number of storms, floods and droughts has fallen sharply.
So just what are the facts?
According to Our World in Data, the death toll from natural disasters is now at record lows.
Their data comes from the International Disaster Database, EM-DAT. Their figures include earthquakes and volcanoes, and when we exclude these, the same pattern is evident:
Average annual deaths between 2011 and 2020 were 10570, a quarter of the previous decade. Needless to say, many disaster events were not recorded earlier in the record, notably prior to 1920.
Last year, an estimated 15080 died from natural disasters. Excluding earthquakes and volcanoes, this figure comes down to 14885, slightly higher than the decadal average, but way below the 2001 to 2010 number:
This year to date, the death toll is much lower at 5881. Obviously there are year-to-year fluctuations, but overall it is plain that Justin Rowlatt told an outright lie in that Panorama programme just two weeks ago.
He was after all specifically reporting on weather disasters this year.
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