Climate Change and Catastrophe: A Data-Driven Examination

Scrutinizing the Direct Impact of Global Warming on Mortality and Economic Losses

Amidst the fervent discourse surrounding climate change and its impacts, a particularly stark narrative often emerges, the assertion that climate change is directly causing an increase in human mortality and damage costs due to extreme weather events. However, a careful examination of empirical data calls into question the directness and simplicity of this claim.

The narrative that climate change is an immediate and direct harbinger of death through extreme weather events pervades public consciousness. It is bolstered by vivid media reporting and is a frequent touchstone in policy discussions.

For example,

1. United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres: In a 2019 speech, Guterres stated that climate change is "the direct existential threat" to humanity and is already causing death and destruction through extreme weather events.

2. Environmental activist Greta Thunberg: In her speech to the United Nations in 2019, Thunberg said that "people are dying" due to climate change and that "entire ecosystems are collapsing."

3. Former United States President Barack Obama: In a 2015 speech, Obama said that "climate change is already affecting our health and safety," citing an increase in heat waves, wildfires, and air pollution as contributing factors to illness and death.

4. World Health Organization (WHO): The WHO has stated that climate change is expected to cause approximately 250,000 additional deaths per year from 2030 to 2050 due to factors such as heat stress, malnutrition, and the spread of infectious diseases.

However, the role of skepticism in science necessitates a rigorous evaluation of such claims. The provided data set, cataloging deaths from disasters since 2000 against global temperature anomalies, serves as a catalyst for such a critique.

The data, as reported by EM-DAT and juxtaposed against GISS temperature anomaly metrics, presents a narrative contrary to the apocalyptic tone often associated with climate change discussions. The low R² value suggests that there is no substantial linear relationship between the temperature deviations from the norm and the mortality rate from extreme weather events. If climate change were as lethal as posited, one might expect a clearer upward trend as temperatures rise. The absence of such a trend is the first pillar of skepticism in the discourse.

A primary consideration often overlooked in the climate mortality narrative is the array of factors that influence death rates from disasters. These include advancements in meteorological forecasting, improvements in emergency preparedness and response, and increased global emphasis on infrastructure resilience. Countries across the world have invested in these areas, highlighting our ability to dampen the lethality of weather phenomena.

While deaths from extreme weather events are tragic and newsworthy, they represent just one of the ways in which climate change can impact society. The broader implications of climate change, including its effects on things like agriculture and infrastructure are multifaceted and less amenable to simple statistical analysis.

So, while the direct lethality of climate change seems not apparent, let’s take a look at how costs associated with extreme weather correlate to temperature anomaly.

Recently, Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. over at The Honest Broker Substack, published his latest numbers and I encourage you to read that article here.

His graph presents the global weather disaster losses as a percentage of Global GDP (Gross Domestic Product) from 1990 to 2023, with data sourced from Munich Re, World Bank, and updates from Pielke 2019. The vertical bars represent the annual losses, showing the proportion of weather disaster losses relative to the global GDP for each year. Superimposed on this bar chart is a moving 5-year average, depicted as a green line, which smooths out the annual fluctuations to provide a clearer view of the underlying trends.

The linear trend line dashed in red, is drawn across the data points to indicate the overall direction of the trend over the entire period. Interestingly, this trend line is slightly decreasing. This suggests that, over the long term, the losses from global weather disasters as a percentage of the world's GDP are not increasing, but rather showing a slight decline.

Upon my request, Dr. Pielke Jr also plotted his results against temperature anomaly and wouldn’t you know…