• Privacy Policy
  • About Us
  • Contact Us
Climate Change Dispatch
  • Home
  • Videos
  • Who We Are
  • Facts Vs. Fearmongering
    • Real science vs Junk Science
      • 1100-plus Peer-Reviewed Studies
      • 97% – Myth of the Climate Change Consensus
      • Michael Crichton: Aliens Cause Global Warming
      • Climate change and its causes
      • Climate Science Primer
      • CO2 is not pollution
      • Deceptive Surface Temperature Records
      • Editorial: Great Global Warming Hoax
      • Rules for Climate Radicals: Part 1
      • Rules for Climate Radicals: Part 2
      • Rules for Climate Radicals: Part 3
      • Why CO2 Is A Minor Player In Global Climate
      • Why Politicized Science Is So Dangerous
    • Facts Not Fear
      • A Simple Question For Climate Alarmists
      • Climate Change – The Facts
      • Climate Change Fears Are Empirically Baseless
      • Global Warming 101
      • Global Warming Q&A
      • Understanding The Medieval Warm Period
      • Ocean Cycles and Climate
      • Overview of Plate Climatology Theory
      • Precautionary Principle
      • Should We Celebrate Carbon Dioxide?
      • The Skeptics Handbook
      • Weather Versus Climate
      • Why I’m a GW skeptic
      • Winning the climate debate with facts
      • Why Aliens Cause Global Warming
    • Greenhouse FAQs
      • CO2, Plants, & Industry
      • How much have temps changed?
      • How much have temps changed?
      • How much have temps changed?
      • Is global warming real?
      • Measuring temperature
      • Swimming in CO2?
      • Scientists urge caution?
      • Today’s warming trend
      • Variations in temperature
    • Gore’s Greatest Goofs
      • Deconstructing the Truth
      • Fact-Checking Al Gore’s Latest Predictions
      • How Gore Created The Global Warming Hoax
    • Inside Real Climate
      • Closer look at the 97% Consensus
      • GW’s Amazing Story
      • IPCC gets failing grade
      • Real Climate Exposed!
      • Truth about Real Climate
      • We’ve Been Conned
      • What is there a 97% consensus about?
    • Behind the IPCC
      • 1,000 Scientists Dissent
      • Climategate: Caught Green-Handed!
      • Climategate Inquiries
      • Climategate Inquiries 2
      • NIPCC Report Now Available
      • Understanding the Climategate Inquiries
  • Submissions
  • Contact Us
No Result
View All Result
  • Home
  • Videos
  • Who We Are
  • Facts Vs. Fearmongering
    • Real science vs Junk Science
      • 1100-plus Peer-Reviewed Studies
      • 97% – Myth of the Climate Change Consensus
      • Michael Crichton: Aliens Cause Global Warming
      • Climate change and its causes
      • Climate Science Primer
      • CO2 is not pollution
      • Deceptive Surface Temperature Records
      • Editorial: Great Global Warming Hoax
      • Rules for Climate Radicals: Part 1
      • Rules for Climate Radicals: Part 2
      • Rules for Climate Radicals: Part 3
      • Why CO2 Is A Minor Player In Global Climate
      • Why Politicized Science Is So Dangerous
    • Facts Not Fear
      • A Simple Question For Climate Alarmists
      • Climate Change – The Facts
      • Climate Change Fears Are Empirically Baseless
      • Global Warming 101
      • Global Warming Q&A
      • Understanding The Medieval Warm Period
      • Ocean Cycles and Climate
      • Overview of Plate Climatology Theory
      • Precautionary Principle
      • Should We Celebrate Carbon Dioxide?
      • The Skeptics Handbook
      • Weather Versus Climate
      • Why I’m a GW skeptic
      • Winning the climate debate with facts
      • Why Aliens Cause Global Warming
    • Greenhouse FAQs
      • CO2, Plants, & Industry
      • How much have temps changed?
      • How much have temps changed?
      • How much have temps changed?
      • Is global warming real?
      • Measuring temperature
      • Swimming in CO2?
      • Scientists urge caution?
      • Today’s warming trend
      • Variations in temperature
    • Gore’s Greatest Goofs
      • Deconstructing the Truth
      • Fact-Checking Al Gore’s Latest Predictions
      • How Gore Created The Global Warming Hoax
    • Inside Real Climate
      • Closer look at the 97% Consensus
      • GW’s Amazing Story
      • IPCC gets failing grade
      • Real Climate Exposed!
      • Truth about Real Climate
      • We’ve Been Conned
      • What is there a 97% consensus about?
    • Behind the IPCC
      • 1,000 Scientists Dissent
      • Climategate: Caught Green-Handed!
      • Climategate Inquiries
      • Climategate Inquiries 2
      • NIPCC Report Now Available
      • Understanding the Climategate Inquiries
  • Submissions
  • Contact Us
No Result
View All Result
Climate Change Dispatch
No Result
View All Result

Lomborg: We’re Safer From Climate-Related Disasters Than Ever Before

by Bjorn Lomborg
November 05, 2021, 2:24 PM
in News and Opinion
Reading Time: 4 mins read
A A
2

hurricane windsActivists constantly talk about the existential threat climate change poses and the deaths natural disasters inflict—but they never quite manage to total up these deaths. (bold added)

One reason is that it’s easier to bend the data about disaster frequency than to bend death statistics. Death tolls tell a very clear story: People are safer from climate-related disasters than ever before.

As this series of articles has covered already, many of the fearful descriptions you hear of souped-up hurricanes, heatwaves, and wildfires aren’t accurate. And estimates of costly but increasingly frequent climate damages are typically designed to mislead.

One you see repeated often in the media is the National Centers for Environmental Information’s statistic that the number of natural disasters costing over $1 billion in damage is on the rise.

But as this series explained in regard to flood costs, only measuring the total damage of natural disasters over time misses the important point—there’s much more stuff to damage today than there was several decades ago.

As the world has gotten richer and its population has grown, the number and quality of structures in the path of floods, fires, and hurricanes have risen.

If you remove this variable by looking at the damage as a percent of gross domestic product, it actually paints an optimistic picture. The trend of weather-related damages from 1990 to 2020 declined from 0.26% of global GDP to 0.18%.

A landmark study shows this has been the trend for poor and rich countries alike, regardless of the types of disasters. Economic growth and innovation have insulated all sorts of people from floods, droughts, wind, heat, and cold.

Still, it’s easy to misuse the data to make things seem worse than they actually are. The International Disaster Database—the biggest disaster data depository in the world—attempts to register every catastrophe around the globe using reports from sources ranging from the press to insurance companies to United Nations agencies.

But because the internet and proliferation of media have made it so much easier to access information today, the database records small natural disasters from 1980 onward that in prior decades wouldn’t have been recorded.

This skews the database by making it appear there are more total disasters today than in the past. (Several U.N. agencies have twisted this data to say just that.)

For instance, the database recorded four times as many earthquakes each year on average after 1980 as it did before.

As the U.S. Geological Survey points out, when databases show more earthquakes, it isn’t because there are actually more earthquakes, but because they have been recorded better over time.

Indeed, almost all of the earthquake increase in the disaster database are composed of small earthquakes that likely just didn’t make the news earlier in the 20th century.

You see the same slant with hurricanes: The disaster database recorded far more U.S. hurricanes after 1980 than before—six times as many a year on average.

But the historical record from dozens of peer-reviewed studies shows the number of landfalling U.S. hurricanes has actually declined slightly since 1900.

Death totals, on the other hand, are much less pliable. While reports on climate catastrophes multiplied over the last century, large-scale deaths have been consistently recorded.

In fact, the disaster database’s death toll is very close to official estimates. And that data tells an incredible and heartening story.

A century ago, almost half a million people died on average each year from storms, floods, droughts, wildfires, and extreme temperatures.

Over the next ten decades, global annual deaths from these causes declined 96%, to 18,000. In 2020, they dropped to 14,000.

Unsurprisingly, the media this year has been filled to the brim with coverage of natural disasters, from the Northwestern Heat Dome to floods in Germany and China.

Yet it has conveniently left out the total death toll.

So far 5,500 people have died from climate-related disasters in 2021. Using previous years’ data to extrapolate, climate-related deaths will probably total about 6,600 by the end of the year.

That’s almost 99% less than the death toll a century ago. The global population has quadrupled since then, so this is an even bigger drop than it looks.

As has been the case across this series of articles, economic growth and technological innovation get the credit for our improving position.

Human beings are pretty good at adapting to their environment, even if it’s changing. Keep that in mind when you see another worried headline about climate disasters.


Bjorn Lomborg is president of the Copenhagen Consensus and a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. This op-ed is adapted from his new book, “False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet.”

Read more at WSJ

  • Truth
  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • LinkedIn
  • Gettr
  • Threads
  • gab-logo Gab
  • Mastodon
  • Buffer
  • Telegram
  • Email
  • Copy Link
  • Share Using More Networks…

Popular Posts

Electric Vehicles (EVs)

The ‘Green’ Scam Of The Century: How ‘Renewables’ Increase Fossil Fuel Demands

Oct 23, 2024
News and Opinion

Antarctica Is Colder, Icier Today Than At Any Time In 5,000 Years

Apr 15, 2024
Energy

30-Plus Signs That The Climate Scam Is Collapsing

Apr 09, 2025

Comments 2

  1. Spurwing Plover says:
    4 years ago

    Bjorn will never get any Awards nor will he ever get big headline in the New York Pravda(Times)he will never be named Person of the Year by Time Magazine but we all trust him better then Gore the Bore and Greta the Fake

    Reply
  2. Donald Cross says:
    4 years ago

    Always enjoy it when Bjorn shows us the real truth about the numbers.

    Reply

Comments are welcome! Those that add no discussion value may be removed.Cancel reply

Stay Connected On Social Media

gab-logo

Donate Today

Beating back the alarmist narrative takes time and money. Please donate today to help!

Recent Posts

  • earth fire burningNational Academies’ Climate Report: Another Tale Of Climate Change Bias
    Oct 7, 2025
    National Academies’ climate report downplays natural variability, exaggerates risks, and conflicts with DOE findings on extreme weather. […]
  • Biden pimping solarLabor Unions, Green Groups Sue EPA For Ending Biden-Era Solar Program
    Oct 7, 2025
    Labor unions and green energy groups are suing the EPA for canceling the Biden-era Solar for All program, which funnels billions from the GGRF. […]
  • power grid lines solarRon Barmby’s ‘Sunset On Net Zero’ Exposes The Flawed Economics Behind Climate Targets
    Oct 7, 2025
    Ron Barmby’s new book explains in understandable language the science and economics of why Net Zero CO2 is pointless, unachievable, and unfair. […]
  • Wind farm constructionIn The Name Of ‘Green’ Energy, Wind Farms Are Devastating Natural Habitats
    Oct 6, 2025
    Wind farms touted as green energy are triggering soil erosion, insect collapse, and biodiversity loss, raising doubts about their true environmental cost. […]
  • Pope Leo ice blessingPope Leo Joins Climate Cultists In Bizarre Ice-Blessing Ritual, Betrays Church’s Mission
    Oct 6, 2025
    Pope Leo joined climate cultists in a strange ice-blessing ceremony, sparking backlash from Christians and raising questions about Catholic priorities. […]
  • Abigail SpanbergerReport: Spanberger Winning Virginia Governor’s Race Would Add $500M a Year to Electricity Bills
    Oct 6, 2025
    Abigail Spanberger’s plan to rejoin the RGGI could add $500M a year to Virginia electricity bills, while Earle-Sears opposes any carbon tax. […]
  • Wall Street financial districtUN-Backed Net-Zero Banking Alliance Shutters, Dealing Blow To ESG Activists
    Oct 6, 2025
    The Net-Zero Banking Alliance has shut down as banks exit, sparking ESG activist backlash over fossil fuel projects and climate goals. […]
  • Massive Amazon deforestation for COP30 roadCOP30’s Carbon Circus: Elites Show Everything That’s Wrong With Climate Alarmism
    Oct 6, 2025
    Skyrocketing costs, private jets, and rainforest destruction expose the hypocrisy surrounding this year’s COP30 climate summit in Brazil. […]
  • oil rig drillAmerica’s Energy Boom Exposes The Folly Of Britain’s Net Zero Disaster
    Oct 3, 2025
    America’s energy boom and policy flexibility are widening the economic gap with Britain, where high prices and net zero goals are stalling growth. […]
  • Arctic sunsetNew Study Shows Arctic Sea Ice Decline Slowing, Driven More by Natural Variability Than Emissions
    Oct 3, 2025
    New study shows Arctic sea ice decline has slowed since 2012, driven more by natural variability than greenhouse gas emissions. […]

Get Instant Email Notifications

Subscribe to receive a digest of daily stories, or get emailed once they're published. Check your Junk/Spam folder for a verification email.

Submit a tip

Please enter your email, so we know you're human.

Books You May Like

exposing great lie

Have a suggestion? Let us know! We swap out books based on your input. We participate in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. See here.

  • About
  • Privacy Policy
  • Contact Us

© Portions copyright Climate Change Dispatch

No Result
View All Result
  • Home
  • Videos
  • Who We Are
  • Facts Vs. Fearmongering
    • Real science vs Junk Science
      • 1100-plus Peer-Reviewed Studies
      • 97% – Myth of the Climate Change Consensus
      • Michael Crichton: Aliens Cause Global Warming
      • Climate change and its causes
      • Climate Science Primer
      • CO2 is not pollution
      • Deceptive Surface Temperature Records
      • Editorial: Great Global Warming Hoax
      • Rules for Climate Radicals: Part 1
      • Rules for Climate Radicals: Part 2
      • Rules for Climate Radicals: Part 3
      • Why CO2 Is A Minor Player In Global Climate
      • Why Politicized Science Is So Dangerous
    • Facts Not Fear
      • A Simple Question For Climate Alarmists
      • Climate Change – The Facts
      • Climate Change Fears Are Empirically Baseless
      • Global Warming 101
      • Global Warming Q&A
      • Understanding The Medieval Warm Period
      • Ocean Cycles and Climate
      • Overview of Plate Climatology Theory
      • Precautionary Principle
      • Should We Celebrate Carbon Dioxide?
      • The Skeptics Handbook
      • Weather Versus Climate
      • Why I’m a GW skeptic
      • Winning the climate debate with facts
      • Why Aliens Cause Global Warming
    • Greenhouse FAQs
      • CO2, Plants, & Industry
      • How much have temps changed?
      • How much have temps changed?
      • How much have temps changed?
      • Is global warming real?
      • Measuring temperature
      • Swimming in CO2?
      • Scientists urge caution?
      • Today’s warming trend
      • Variations in temperature
    • Gore’s Greatest Goofs
      • Deconstructing the Truth
      • Fact-Checking Al Gore’s Latest Predictions
      • How Gore Created The Global Warming Hoax
    • Inside Real Climate
      • Closer look at the 97% Consensus
      • GW’s Amazing Story
      • IPCC gets failing grade
      • Real Climate Exposed!
      • Truth about Real Climate
      • We’ve Been Conned
      • What is there a 97% consensus about?
    • Behind the IPCC
      • 1,000 Scientists Dissent
      • Climategate: Caught Green-Handed!
      • Climategate Inquiries
      • Climategate Inquiries 2
      • NIPCC Report Now Available
      • Understanding the Climategate Inquiries
  • Submissions
  • Contact Us

© 2025 Climate Change Dispatch

Share via
  • Facebook
  • Like
  • Twitter
  • Pinterest
  • LinkedIn
  • Digg
  • Tumblr
  • VKontakte
  • Print
  • Email
  • Reddit
  • Buffer
  • Love This
  • Weibo
  • Pocket
  • Xing
  • Odnoklassniki
  • WhatsApp
  • Meneame
  • Blogger
  • Amazon
  • Yahoo Mail
  • Gmail
  • AOL
  • Newsvine
  • HackerNews
  • Evernote
  • MySpace
  • Mail.ru
  • Viadeo
  • Line
  • Flipboard
  • Comments
  • SMS
  • Viber
  • Telegram
  • Subscribe
  • Facebook Messenger
  • Kakao
  • LiveJournal
  • Yammer
  • Edgar
  • Fintel
  • Mix
  • Instapaper
  • Copy Link
  • Truth
  • gab-logo Gab
  • Gettr
  • Baidu
  • Mastodon
  • Threads
  • Bluesky
Share via
  • Digg
  • Tumblr
  • VKontakte
  • Print
  • Email
  • Reddit
  • Buffer
  • Love This
  • Weibo
  • Pocket
  • Xing
  • Odnoklassniki
  • WhatsApp
  • Meneame
  • Blogger
  • Amazon
  • Yahoo Mail
  • Gmail
  • AOL
  • Newsvine
  • HackerNews
  • Evernote
  • MySpace
  • Mail.ru
  • Viadeo
  • Line
  • Flipboard
  • Comments
  • SMS
  • Viber
  • Telegram
  • Subscribe
  • Facebook Messenger
  • Kakao
  • LiveJournal
  • Yammer
  • Edgar
  • Fintel
  • Mix
  • Instapaper
  • Copy Link
  • Truth
  • gab-logo Gab
  • Gettr
  • Baidu
  • Mastodon
  • Threads
  • Bluesky