The article about natural disasters didn’t address the fact we’re not slaughtering off ourselves near as much. Only the 2004 Indonesia earthquake and tsunami comes close to the death toll we saw during WWII. In six years something like 50 million dead, several countries completely ruined, American isolationism abandoned … how do we even measure the cost here.
There were 4 and a half billion people on earth in 1980, now there’s a hair over 7 billion. Human flesh covers more of the earth, in other words, the more people there are, the more people that die in disasters.
Not disagreeing that the world’s weather has become worse, but the more crowded it is, the more people that can get killed. It would be interesting if Cecil could normalize the comparison.
There are definitely more natural disasters being counted, but that’s not necessarily because there are more natural disasters. The increase in disastrous weather corresponds to the increase in the use of satellites to monitor weather on a global scale. The number of “dead spots”, big stretches of the globe where monitoring was spotty at best, decreased from bunches in 1970 to zero in 1990.
Plus what Marion_Wormer said. Not only more people but greater urbanization give a bad storm more things to damage. Not to mention that much of that urban infrastructure seems badly built, unable to hold up to easily foreseeable events (like a Class I hurricane riding on top of a spring tide).
Occam’s Razor demands that these simple, known causes be held constant before more theoretically complex causes are invoked.
–Yan
(PS. By “easily foreseeable” I means “highly likely to occur during the design lifetime of the structure”, roughly 75-150 years for major infrastructure. For instance, people know that small hurricanes hit nearly everywhere on the Atlantic coast every few years and that each such hurricane has a 1/14th chance of riding on top of a spring tide. And they know how high a spring tide is. Combine those common bits of info and you get the conclusion that a 14 foot tide in New York is a near certainty for any major structure or urban lot expected to last for 150 years. This was “easily foreseeable”, and people ignored it to save money. I question the use of the term “natural” in such cases; if Sandy had hit the Roanoke River mouth no one would have noticed.)
“You see where it gets tricky — the definition of natural disaster is unavoidably tied to the number of people affected and/or the value of the damage done, both of which will naturally increase as the earth’s population and wealth do, and of course wealth and population aren’t evenly distributed worldwide.”
Easily one of the worst, and weakest, answers ever.
If you conflate population and “natural disaster,” the question becomes “Is the world’s population increasing?” Duh.
Yet another example of the eagerness with which to work climate change doom and income inequality into any conversation, bereft of reason and facts.
The obvious intent of the question is to find out if natural disasters are increasing; not if more humans are being affected by them.
The Master goes on to acknowledge the better reporting, but the numbers above are actual events. Now if we were comparing data from the 1880’s. you’d have an decent argument. I’m afraid it falls apart when we’re talking about the 1980’s. The example you mention about “blind spots” in 1970 ended in 1974 with the orbital insertion of the GOES-1 satellite, which is full hemisphere projections in both visible and infrared wavelengths. By 1980 we were tracking almost all tropical storms.
The 24 hour news cycle began on Nov 4th, 1979. So in the 1980’s we’re starting to see more widespread news coverage. Clearly this is “better” reporting, but that doesn’t mean these natural disasters weren’t reported at all beforehand. Even today an EF-1 tornado tearing up a small rural village in Eastern Congo isn’t making it on CNN. However, you can bet your stars that the newspapers and radio stations in Eastern Congo are going to be reporting it. By the 1980’s, rain gauges and thermometers have world-wide distribution. At least local and regional news reporting is decent enough … c’mon … it’s a disaster, just because there’s not 17 live video feeds doesn’t mean the WMO won’t hear about it.
Yes, there are twice as many people on Earth than there was in the 1980’s. We’re not inhabiting twice as much land area though. The numbers above are events, without considering death tolls or financial costs. A typhoon slamming Layte in 1980 maybe tore up 1,000 homes, that’s one event. Today the same track tears up 1,000,000 homes, but it’s still just one event. What we’re looking at is five times the number of these events, five times the number of tornadoes, five times the number of hurricanes, five times the number of floods, five times the number of droughts … just from 35 years ago.
Now I’ll admit I’ve only been reading NWS copy daily for the past twenty years, so I really can’t dispute the WMO data. But frankly, if there were five times the events here in the USA, I’d think I would have noticed. There’s 3 or 4 hurricanes that land on our shores today on average, that means in 1980 it was every other year? We just can’t argue “proof by graph” now can we?
I’m not sure that’s true in anything but a vague statistical sense. In simple set/stat theory, yes, of course. In the real world… I am not sure there’s anything more than a loose correlation between population and disaster fatalities.
Simple example: if you have a city of 1 million and an earthquake hits and kills 1,000 of them, and then 50 years later it’s a city of 2 million with perhaps 1.25X the population density, the deaths from another earthquake would depend on many more factors than the number of hoomans per square meter. So to say 2,000 deaths are expected is terribly simplistic.
Another example: evacuation and disaster preparedness would be proportional to population, leaving much the same small segment exposed to fatal conditions. Incompetence could triple the fatalities; reasonable policies and protection could halve them. But the sheer number of people is still a very minor factor overall.