Re: Climate Change Mega Thread
Posted: Jan 7th, 2021, 7:39 pm
Pretty picture, but you didn't provide the context. Deaths are lowered not because of some sort of intrinsic change/non-change in climate, but because we are better prepared for disaster today than we were in the past.Glacier wrote:https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/a ... zuZMrkQbvwsource:
"However, the large reduction in climate-related deaths from disasters shows a dramatic increase in climate resilience, likely mostly brought about by higher living standards, a reduction in poverty, improvement in warning systems, and an increase in global trade, making especially droughts less likely to turn into widespread famines.
The same declining trend for climate-related mortality rates is found across individual hazards from flood, flash flood, and coastal flood, over heat and cold deaths to drought and wind damage (Formetta and Feyen 2019). A 10-year moving average from 1980 to 2016 shows a 6.5-fold reduction in the mortality rate (ranging from a twofold reduction in floods to a 16-fold reduction in flash floods).
We often forget how much of the world was devastated by famines in previous centuries. Although famine outside of wartime disappeared from the developed world after the mid-nineteenth century (Ó Gráda 2010, 8), large famines continued in poorer countries, with the late 1870s killing more than 7 million in India and 9.5–13 million in China (Ó Gráda 2010, 21). Even the 1928–30 drought was described by the Committee of the China Famine Relief Fund as “one of the most wide-spread and severe famines in many decades,” spreading inland to the upper reaches of the Yellow River, Inner Mongolia, Gansu, and Shaanxi, where “three successive harvest...failed to materialize,” leaving more than 50 million people in total ‘“severely affected” (Fuller 2015, 157–58). In total, the Famine Trends Dataset estimates 5.5–10 million dead (WPF 2019), with EM-DAT conservatively counting 3 million deaths.
Fig. 17 shows that we are now much less vulnerable to climate impacts than at any time in the last 100 years. It is possible that climate change has made impacts worse over the last century (although the discussion on floods, droughts, wildfire, and hurricanes suggests this is not the case), but resiliency from higher living standards has entirely swamped any potential climate impact."