By Jo Nova
Congratulations World!
Roger Pielke Jnr celebrates another great year where humanity had a near record low in deaths due to climate disasters.
He reminds us of a paper from a few years ago showing that the richer we all are, the less likely we are to die from floods, cold, drought and wind.
When we adjust against GDP per capita we find that GDP itself is the big protector of humanity.
The best thing we can do to help Africans defeat climate hazards is not to send them solar panels, but to help them get filthy rich.
And anyone who cares about vulnerable people will be protesting at the reckless destruction of what was a cheap, efficient electricity grid. We will surely kill more people by reducing our GDP with unreliable generators, than we will ever save with solar panels.
Once income is accounted for, the apparent relationship between climate hazards and mortality largely disappears. In other words, economic development—not renewable energy—dominates human survival outcomes.
Follow the Science, girls and boys,
If man-made emissions do anything at all, the more we emit the lower the death rates are. We can see that as man made emissions ramped up from 1980 to 2010, deaths due to extreme weather fell.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959378019300378
I could add in a snarky line about using “Green reasoning”, but the truth is that countries that emit more CO2 tend to increase their GDP.
All those fossil fueled rockets, ambulances, satellites, mobile phones and private cars are saving people.
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Richer societies have far lower vulnerability to floods, droughts, heat, cold, and storms
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The decline in deaths has occurred despite population growth and urbanisation
The data suggest that GDP growth has done more to protect humanity from climate-related deaths than any climate policy ever implemented.
REFERENCE:
Giuseppe Formetta and Luc Feyen (2019)Empirical evidence of declining global vulnerability to climate-related hazards, Global Environmental Change, 57, 101920.