By Jo Nova
To solve the increase in global disasters just axe the UN
Despite a galactic rise in Headlines of Doom, the world is a safer place than ever. The United Nations however is an absolute danger to our quality of life and our children’s mental health. They’ve shamelessly concocted the myth that disasters are increasing due to “climate change”.
NetZeroWatch report on a new paper on natural disasters and find that yearly deaths are down. Somehow satellites, phones, antibiotics, bulldozers and fire trucks are better at saving lives than horse drawn carts and hessian bags. Who would have guessed, apart from everyone?
Below the graph of natural disaster events shows a huge increase in the reporting of disasters, at least up until the turn of the century. But there is, if anything, a decline since then. There are three very different trends. But the giant bureaucratic sponge that is the United Nations can shamelessly draw a straight linear trend through this graph and tell the world that disasters are getting worse, even as they are obviously not.
In the last twenty years, humans have put out 40% of all the CO2 emissions they’ve ever put out since they lived in caves, but disasters have decreased 20%. It used to be that 20 year trends were enough to launch a new UN committee, but now the only trend-length that matters is the one that goes “up”.
Another pair of analysts point out the CRED (Centre on the Epidemiology of Disasters) was only set up in 1973 and the EM-DAT database was only established in 1988. (Ritichie and Rosado). Even the CRED team itself has warned people about reading too much into these trends, yet practically every separate wing of the UN has done exactly that. The FAO said “disaster events have increased from 100 per year in the 1970s to around 400 events per year worldwide in the past 20 years.” The UN Chief said “natural disasters have quadrupled since 1970.” The the UNFCC took his misinformation and repeated it. A few years ago the WMO said “The number of disasters has increased by a factor of five over the 50-year period.” The BBC and The Economist lapped it up. Too many mistakes is never enough.
In 2019, the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) opined about the “‘staggering rise in climate-related disasters over the last twenty years’” proving only that lying UN agencies are a bigger threat to the science than the entire fossil fuel industry ever was.
The rise in all of these disasters is mostly because people got better at reporting disasters. Back in 1901 if a cyclone landed in Ecuador, nobody rang up the UN, which didn’t exist, on phones that weren’t installed, to tell them about it. And when global population was five times smaller in 1900 tornados could wander the prairies and sometimes no one would notice. Droughts could strike rivers and unless the fish complained, who would know?
Suspiciously geophysical disasters (like earthquakes and volcanoes) have also increased “since 1900” and at about the same rate and with the same “break point” in the trend. Obviously our gas guzzling cars are not causing earthquakes and beef-steak doesn’t set off volcanoes. So the rapid increase in these sorts of disasters in the 1970s and 1980s supports the theory that the rapid rise an artefact of data collection. There’s a lot more detail on that in the paper.
Meanwhile, the relentless good news on global crops continues.
If there really were more storms and frosts and devastating floods, you’d think the rice paddies and cornfields of the world would have noticed.
Yet here they go again, growing 2 to 4% more grain year after year.
Alimonti and Mariani don’t mince their words — the increase is just “better reporting”:
We conclude that the patterns observed are largely attributable to progressively better reporting of natural disaster events, with the EM-DAT dataset now regarded as relatively complete since ∼2000. The above result sits in marked contradiction to earlier analyses by two UN bodies (FAO andUNDRR), which predicts an increasing number of natural disasters and impacts in concert with global warming. Our analyses strongly refute this assertion as well as extrapolations published by UNDRR based on this claim.
The claim that the increase in disasters registered in EM-DAT in the final part of the twentieth century is mostly, if not completely, caused by better reporting and not by a real events increase, is supported by three independent lines of evidence: (a) several CRED reports (Guha-Sapir et al., 2004; Scheuren et al., 2008; CRED, 2015); (b) best fit analysis that found an important breakpoint and even a change in the trend sign of natural disasters at the beginning of the 21th century, in agreement with what is written and justified in point a; (c) the same trend change and breakpoint for geophysical disasters that have very little, if anything, to do with human activities or global warming.
But it’s also “better blindness”. If the BBC, The Economist, and all the other sycophant agents of groupthink and power-mongers asked for “a graph” (with all the data) the facade would fall over in a week.
REFERENCES
Gianluca Alimonti & Luigi Mariani (2024) Is the number of global natural disasters increasing?, Environmental Hazards, vol 23: No 2, 186-202, DOI:
10.1080/17477891.2023.2239807
Emergency Events Database (EM-DAT) from the Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED).
Hannah Ritchie and Pablo Rosado (2024) – “Is the number of natural disasters increasing?” Published online at OurWorldInData.org.
The GWPF helpfully provides a list of references, including their work refuting these claims:
- Hannah Ritchie and Pablo Rosado (2024) – “Is the number of natural disasters increasing?” Our World In Data
- Ralph Alexander: Extreme Weather in 2020 (pdf)
- Paul Homewood: UN claim “Staggering rise in climate emergencies since 2000”
- GWPF: Red Cross claims of increasing climate disasters is “grossly misleading”
- GWPF: Disasters report features ‘crudely manipulated data’
- UN disasters report is a huge blunder and embarrassment: GWPF calls for fatally flawed UN report to be withdrawn
Greenpeace and the other usual suspects atrocious campaign against vitamin a enriched golden rice really needs to be called out by the proper authorities
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The Left obviously don’t mind blind children.
Even the lunatic Left WHO admits the problem:
They are probably deliberately understating the numbers.
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WHO is a massive problem.
Join Australia exits the WHO!
https://australiaexitsthewho.com/
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Access to this site is forbidden. It must be a truly devastating threat to the elites.
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I had no problem.
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The link is available on DuckDuckgo, the only search engine worth using.
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Pushback.
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Alarmists twist themselves into mental knots in maintaining that more CO2 is not beneficial to plant growth. Global greening is anathema to their cause.
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Microbial competition for phosphorus limits the CO2 response of a mature forest
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07491-0
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Alarmists twist themselves into mental knots in maintaining that more CO2 is not beneficial to plant growth.
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We are living in the safest, healthiest, most information rich and most prosperous of times.
The Left are trying to destroy it all.
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Spot on David and thanks again to Jo Nova.
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The more observant amongst you would have noticed that Jo neglected to mention economic or insurance losses to natural disasters, which are most definitely increasing. https://www.munichre.com/en/risks/natural-disasters.html
Small changes to weather mean and standard deviation radically change the probability of extreme events.
https://images.app.goo.gl/nFA5tLezHEhdTYvt9
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Simon, since the climate models don’t understand the climate, can’t predict anything, and ignore solar factors, any weather changes are probably natural. The increased costs of economic damage and insurance are likely just inflation — ignore the CPI rigged figure and look at money supply. There is vastly more dollars in the system, so “of course” any damage will be wildly more expensive. And what’s the value of a human life? Those costs have gone down. (Obviously).
Add to that, there are vastly more buildings, more people, and more things to damage than there were in 1920.
Small changes to weather are irrelevant in a system controlled by large forces we don’t understand. You are clutching at straws.
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Jo cites inflation with boosting insurance costs. True, but slightly incomplete.
Insurance companies must allocate capital to cover potential loses, of course. But the actual costs of holding capital for future compensation (ie insured losses) is governed by interest rates plus (or minus) inflation (deflation). And since real interest rates have risen, premium costs rise with it.
The era of low or no interest rate is over.
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Look at the value of 50 year old house and one 10 years old. You have an idea about the reason for the increase ?
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Simon you’re talking about two different things.
For the first:
Economic & insurance losses to natural disasters increase independently of any change in the frequency or severity of natural disasters, because the economic value of what’s damaged and what’s insured increases over time as population increases and the built environment and infrastructure increases.
For the second:
The statistics applied to the probability of extreme events say nothing about whether they are caused by man-made atmospheric CO2.
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Simon every time a Tesla goes up in smoke or a house from a battery fire will add to the number of insurance claims .
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I’d say your munichre link means SFAll. Try listing a link with some substance
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The “Left” is an euphemism for communism. Communism cannot get traction among ” the safest, healthiest, most information rich and most prosperous” people in history so they need to make us less safe by defunding the police or making crime not crime, less healthy by making drugs available to kids and having them take useless vaccines that cause serious side effects, less informed by stifling free speech and only allowing approved information and finally by taking from the poor and giving to a very select few through, among other things, unreliable but expensive electricity and restricting gas supplies.
Communism is on the march and fully supported by the ALP and Greens plus a few misguided or stupid Coalition members. Democrats and RINOs do the same in the USA.
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You left out the Teals.
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Yes indeed, they are the epitome, but at the moment they are not communists, more pinko.
‘Pinko is a pejorative term for a person on the left of the political spectrum. The term has its origins in the notion that pink is a lighter shade of red …’ (wiki)
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Would be interesting to see outcomes for man induced disasters causing death versus natural eg wars/conflicts, Covid/vaccines, harmful drugs, drug wars, mass suicides, genocides by governments, poisoning via gas or chemical leaks etc. Interesting but maybe a useless list . . .
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Difficult to figure out … suppose there’s heavy rain, and your house floods, but the drains were blocked and if you had cleared those drains a few days earlier then you house would be fine.
Natural of man made?
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The UN Report on Human Security (2004? 2007? Wiki has an entry on it) initiated a couple of think tanks to track issues of wars, civil wars, violent conflict and those harmed by them in order to get meat on a global level. Again, I haven’t tracked these, except that the long term trend supports general decline in violence (Steven Pinker’s thesis).
Spike in sub-Saharan and mostly Islamist violence, and spikes with Iranian supported terrorism and rebellion in the Middle East, notwithstanding.
Swells in mass violence ebbs and flows. During the Biden years, the costs of exercising mass violence fell, and thus bad actors like newly enriched oil satrapies like Iran have filled the gap. Of this, we can be sure.
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The promotion and use of censorship by the Left is part of their war against Truth.
They don’t want people to know harm due to natural disasters is decreasing.
They want people to be in a perpetual state of fear. They’re easier to control that way. They want people to think disaster, boiling oceans, drought, famine, pandemic disease etc. is all around the corner.
Due to profound scientific ignorance due to the Left’s dumbing down of the education system and turning it into an indoctrination system, the Sheeple tend to believe it.
Plus the Left have no worthy or original ideas to say, so they are not afraid of censorship denying them their right to say them. One of the resident Leftists on this page, a few days ago, pointed to a blog site it had an account on that it had not posted a single thing on in eight(?) years. It was proud of this fact.
There was the following article about a group that was to censor climate articles on Wikipedia plus the UK Government, but, alas, it has been censored.
The following is all you can get as a search engine extract:
Of course, censorship of anyone questioning the Official Narrative on climate, covid or anything else is routinely censored or mocked.
Leftist lies have made people believe that scientific fact is established by “consensus” opinion. Not facts and the scientific method.
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SEE LINK FOR REST (PAYWALLED)
And how long before Australia’s e Safety Commissar starts censoring any sceptical views of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming?
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The minute the censors say debate is over, is the minute you know they have no credible answers.
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We’re told cars are wasteful. Wasteful of what? Oil did a lot of good sitting in the ground for millions of years. We’re told cars should be replaced with mass transportation… And we’re told cars cause pollution. A hundred years ago city streets were ankle deep in horse excrement. What kind of pollution do you want? Would you rather die of cancer at eighty or typhoid fever at nine?
P. J. O’Rourke ~ 1980s
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Oil is awful. The Land of Milk and Honey had no awful oil. Talk about an own goal. The Arabs have all the oil.
Combustion is returning black awful polluting oil to its original components before photosynthesis, pure CO2 and H2O. The essential ingredients of all life on earth. To class either as pollution is absurd. Oil is the problem and we are cleaning the earth with combustion engines. The fact that it has been a huge benefit to mankind is wonderful.
Fossil fuel energy is Clean Energy.
How many Greens refuse to fly?
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We are cleansing the planet with combustion engines.
Wind and solar are ecological disasters, unreliable and destructive of the environment and generate a decade of CO2 in advance just in manufacture. If you believe CO2 is bad, how is that even logical? Half of the life of the windmill it is in CO2 debt!
And following that logic, a HE coal generator could halve CO2 immediately and last 60 years, so 1/3 of the capital cost, a tiny fraction of the land and no new transmission lines!
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Imagine the racket of iron tyres going over cobblestones and horse dung knee deep in the streets, the flies and the smell would be something.
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The global deaths from famines has markedly decreased since 1960 and I’ll try to link to this OWI Data graph of famines starting in 1860.
I hope this works.
https://ourworldindata.org/famines
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Sorry I can’t seem to isolate the graph I wanted to link to, but this full page does include famines from 1860 and the graph I tried to link to is there as well.
My computer skills are obviously very poor, to put it mildly.
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Not really a problem Neville. You only have to look at the drought and famine records from 1876 to 1879 and again in 1896 to 1900. These droughts affected Brazil, India and Southern China, all at the same time. In the 1876 to 1879 famine in India, Digby estimated 10.3 million deaths. Seavoy estimated 6.1 million. In the 1896 famine, The Lancet estimated 19 million. The death tole in China for the 2 events is estimated at between 19.5 and 30 million. Had this happened today, the media and all the climate alarmists would have been all over it as climate change. So we obviously had climate change in 1876 and again in 1896 as there can be no other natural explanation for this. The middle ground estimate for both events is around 50 million deaths and try finding a modern equivalent in our current climate crisis.
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Craig Kelly posted on X yesterday – “Yes, the Climate is changing – all the data shows that it’s getting safer”. Which was in response to a Tony Heller X post indicating that in the 1800’s there were huge hurricane events in the US when the CO2 levels were still comparatively low.
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Cold times produce very severe hurricanes.
The 1780 Atlantic hurricane season was extraordinarily destructive, it was the deadliest Atlantic hurricane season in recorded history, with over 28,000 deaths.
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The Australian Website
ALP fudges ‘facts’ as it powers up scare campaign
Chris Bowen is arguing the world doesn’t want zero-emissions nuclear energy – but then why is there so much being commissioned?
&
Bowen’s arguments unplugged on nuke costs and demand
The fact is that nuclear plants last 60 to 100 years, a much longer timeframe than the CSIRO’s assumption of just 30 years.
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Anyone who walked away from nuclear has regretted it. In Europe they ALL rely on French nuclear.
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Somebody commented that even the Germans are thinking about using nuclear again. But I haven’t seen any links to reports.
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He’s Labor, so he’s using the old Paul Keating tactic. Never admit you’re wrong, just come back harder at your critics. Watch, he’ll start getting really abusive as he finally realises that the GENCOST findings are complete garbage.
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They seem to completely ignore France.
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The irony is that if one matches this increase in natural disasters with deaths from climate disasters there is an inverse relationship. And if that is the case then what is the problem. Climate change can’t be an existential threat if the numbers dying from climate events is shrinking. And it’s not a marginal decline it’s around 95% over 100+ years. If the UN claims there are more incidents then that makes the achievements even more remarkable.
What it shows is that man’s ingenuity in dealing with climate events is increasing much more quickly than the supposed increase in frequency or intensity of climate events. It may be air conditioning, warning systems, better communications, safer houses but whatever it is these facts show that to deal with climate events it’s far easier and more effective to adapt to the weather than trying to change it.
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The sooner we stop calling weather an ‘event’ the sooner we get on with the normal patterns of this continent.
The only way to bring grifters to heel is take away their power. Their desire to invent terms to make themselves important only has power if the public buys into it.
Just like DEI & ESG, etc the public needs to stop using Marxist propaganda terms like global boiling and catastrophe and needs to laugh at the useful idiots in the media who want to perpetuate that scaremongering for clickbait.
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Talking about scary weather stories…
SEE LINK FOR REST
Keep the terror going.
And also when it says there were 30 “incidents” remember that in today’s society many Sheeple feel powerless and clueless so they call authorities out even for trivial things they should have been able to do themselves. Obviously, that’s not always the case.
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This is always what happens before a drought. And the dams are all totally inadequate for what is a land of drought and flooding rains. Thanks, Greens.
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But,but,but Tim Flannery said………
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This is the doing of the UN. We are told to worry about natural disasters from pole to pole. And we are told we have to stop powering our lives with fossil fuels because we are helping the Laplanders migration patterns. Or saving the Polar bears.
Here at home it is an enormous cost, disruption and wiping out our livelihood. For no good reason.
But the story from the President of the UN no less, is that we are on a “highway to hell”, “boiling oceans” and that fuel vendors are evil profiteers. Except not one bit of that is true. Why does he persist? Hasn’t he anything more important to do?
And no one believes it except those too young to know which way is up or the easily scared. And that is the entire point. Chicken Little/Henny Penny time. And Antonio Gutteres is Foxy Loxy.
Climate Change is just a grab for cash, a UN led scam. $100Bn a year UN cash to save the planet. Why?
Fire the UN. Or radical surgery. It was a terrible day in 1988 when the UN decided to get into the weather scare business with the WMO.
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And the stats coming out of that un-natural disaster that was covid are potentially in for a bumpy review if honesty gets the inside running.
A new slant on the covid issue that isn’t a conspiracy theory so censorship is going to be hard to enforce, is emerging amongst mainstream doctors in the USA with the only way to disprove their questions/claims being one that would potentially blow the house of cards claim that the covid vaccine is/was safe and effective down once and for all.
Alarming health trend of rare and unusual cancers suddenly being diagnosed in patients who shouldn’t fit the bill. Knee jerk mantra response of course is to blame covid which indeed could be correct but to be sure the only way would be a test which INCLUDES all the variable contributing factors:
A) People who had covid then got inoculated
B) People who got inoculated then got covid
C) People who got inoculated and never got covid
D) People who did not get inoculated and did not get covid
E) People who did not get inoculated and did get covid.
USA figures 2019 (pre-covid) some 1.7m cancer cases reported 599,601 deaths, 2022 1.9m new cancer cases and around 609,000 deaths. NIH projects for 2023 some 2m new cases with around 610,000 deaths.
Will be interesting to see “them” justify the accuracy/validity of any results from a study that includes A, B, C above but not D and E data.
“That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.”
Never forget, never forgive,
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Australians, Canadians, Americans and anyone else currently living in Marxist run Western countries need to make it clear to their prospective conservative candidates in upcoming elections that their vote will go to candidates – and their party – who are serious about defunding the UN, WHO, UNRWA and the associated quango’s and leeches surreptitiously funded by them to work AGAINST the people who fund them!
Put the money being wasted on the current browbeating into providing demountables for these ‘selfless protectors’ to be erected in Antarctica with a biannual supply ship and let’s see them put their expertise into more efficient environmental and humanitarian assistance via zoom, without the inconvenience of having to fly around the world, staying in 5-7 star accommodation!
Staying in Antarctica instead of the struggles of being in New York, Switzerland and the hellhole of fully airconditioned Dubai should increase Guterres global boiling credentials without the ‘unfair’ criticisms from the Wests taxpayers!
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Obviously they got the ole fraudster Mann to run those raw numbers through the alGoreIthm.
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Wherever budgets are set by Committees, you will find crises
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Still being investigated: http://www.hammarskjoldinquiry.info/
How do the ongoing UN Secretary Generals internalise this info…?
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This analysis hinges on the definition of “disaster”. So what is it? Some weather or natural event that results in human fatalities. Surely an ever increasing population with many living in the wrong place should be the core of the problem. There would be no hydrological disasters when all folk live above flood plains; away from the coast; above dam like structures; and avoid going to sea! Similarly folk should avoid seismic and volcanic events by not residing there.
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Any astronomical Scientist looking for a black hole look no further than Snowy 2.0.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87X0P5w-KEE
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No one in parliament wants to say anything. The Liberals because it was their disaster. Labor because they cannot shut it down without losing Green credibilty. And the Greens because it is utterly a waste of money, like all Green schemes.
But even today, it is likely cheaper and faster to build a nuclear plant. Which actually generates power. A leaky battery does not. And there is not enough water to run the thing anyway.
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It is perverse that when Snowy 2 is finished, you need more windmills to power the thing. Because if the water is pumped up by coal, it makes no sense at all, especially with 30% losses.
This should never have passed simple analysis and was rejected in the 1950s because it didn’t make economic sense then. It still doesn’t. And the Greens are not screaming at the mass destruction of the National park with Snowy II or Windmills because it fits their agenda. Not because there is any benefit. It’s not their money.
So where’s the $444Million Malcolm? Is wasting $20Bn just a cover up?
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Are windmills CO2 free against coal power plants?
No.
I have read that the CO2 generated in making a windmill is equal to 10 years of CO2 output with a lifespan of only 20 years. So with magic nett zero accounting the next ten years ‘saves’ an equal amount and overall they produce no ‘nett’ CO2. This is sophistry.
So what? The total amount of CO2 exclusively associated with this windmill is not zero. It starts with a ten years of CO2. Over the twenty years the total CO2 produced is still half that of a coal power plant.
But if you changed the coal power plant to HE you would save as much CO2. HE coal would save as much CO2 generation as windmills! Coal is free. Plus like a factory the power plant could last forever, at least 60-80 years, reducing the capital cost to zero. And all the coal power plants in Australia fit in a few hundred acres with existing transmission lines.
Wind is free but windmills are not free. They are disposable and an endless cost. We will never finish. And the CO2 generated is 50% of coal.
So why buy and install Chinese windmills in all our beautiful places? They have to be continually replaced anyway and the CO2 output in doing so cancels the entire reason for windmills. In a world of only windmills, the CO2 cost of them is 50% of what we had in the first place. Plus the endless cost.
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Except that in hunting the 10 year period seems extreme. I am now reading 7 months. I will get to the bottom of this.
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The problem of increased reporting vs increased incidence of disasters on EMDAT have been discussed several times at WattsUpWithThat:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2021/10/21/em-dat-disaster-database-creating-data-disasters/
So, like any good skeptic does, Kip Hansen went to the source to ask the owners of the data what their data was actually showing. Their own words confirm that increased reporting was the reason why the number of disasters grew until 1999. After 2000, rates of reporting stabilised, so the reduction in the number of disasters represents a genuine drop in actual disasters.
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“Disasters” increasing since 1901″
What else has HUGELY increased in the same time frame?
COMMUNICATIONS.
And that really started with two things almost in parallel: The laying of undersea and transcontinental telegraph cables around the globe and steam-powered shipping. Hence, drastically increased “news” sources a,d radically reduced “news cycles”
Then, in the early 20th century, radio and aircraft appeared in the same decade. And, let’s not forget, photography, without which folks had to be content with “artists renditions”, laboriously hand-painted or etched, by hand, onto printers’ blocks.. Photographic technology enabled not just the acquisition of images, but the means of transferring them by “screening and photo-etching, onto printing plates.The “camera may not lie; but one has to be a bit wary of all the “human” elements in the chain, from the photographer to the publisher.
So, now we are in the “information” age; constantly bombarded by an array of competing / complementary technologies,manipulated by the the full spectrum of human motivation.
Between McLuhan and his “Medium is the Message” idea and Daniel Boorstin’s quirky look at ‘Pseudo-events”, things get really “interesting”, in that apocryphal Chinese Curse sort of way. It is likely to be very difficult to get the “spinmeisters” back in their box.
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Since “Saturday” is in the W.A. temporal rift:
Oklahoma will not enforce mandates by the WHO, UN, or WEF under new law
Bill 426 will go into action immediately, and states that Oklahoma is not bound by any requirements or mandates issued by the globalist organizations.
https://x.com/RebelNews_USA/status/1799165913553395806
Any (real) Aussie pollies with the cahones to do the same?
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I remember that Ayn Rand wrote an article entitled “The Age of Envy” (I believe it was in 1971), and she said, (as I recall) that the attitude of people at that time (specifically including environmentalists) was “an enemy of anything that enables man [ormen?] to survive….an enemy of life and of everything living.” It seems to me that she was right.
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I agree with Ayn Rand’s remarks in “The Age of Envy” in 1971.
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