“Heat a silent killer” | David Dodwell. My comments and counters

Another sloppy scare piece from David Dodwell

PRE-WORD: This is not a “climate denier” post. I’m big renewables fan, support also Nuclear (and Gas). But I’m solidly against the sort of sloppy scaremongering that Dodwell does here. The data don’t warrant the scaremongering. And it’s counterproductive, as kids become disillusioned that they can even do anything. Or support extremist outfits that don’t help, like Just Stop Oil. 

My comments and counters to Dodwell’s piece above:

1.  Cold vs Heat: According to The Lancet, COLD kills more people globally than does Heat.

With a warming world, more people have survived because temperatures are not quite as cold  (“non-optimal” per The Lancet) as they were, than have died from increased heat. (The Lancet, July 2021). In other words, one result of increasing temperatures is a net decrease in excess deaths due to that temperature change. Of course, this is not to call for more warming! But it is to say that there is an upside to the warming that is completely ignored by Dodwell.

2.  Deaths from disasters:  The number of people who die each year from disasters — including landslides, drought, wildfires, storms and flooding — has fallen 98% since 1920. (Source: Our World in Data)

3.  Storm strength: The number and strength of typhoons (hurricanes) in our region has fallen slightly in the last century (source: the Hong Kong Observatory)

My chart from HKO data. See also here
Looking back to 1950 the trend is the same

4.  Low confidence in climate link: According to the US National Academy of Science, Climate scientists have Low Confidence that floods, wildfires, storms are climate-change related. The only thing with High confidence is the change in temperatures (higher maxima and minima).

Source: National Academy of Science

5.  Financial Costs: Looking at money costs of meteorological disasters, according to the United Nations, as a proportion of global GDP they have slightly decreased in recent decades:

From Munich RE and UN, via here. Most increases are
due to people living closer to the sea or in fire-prone forests

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Most of Dodwell’s figures quoted in the article above are either slippery (huge range) or spuriously (suspiciously) accurate. They are often trivial when calculated per unit of GDP, per year. 

ADDED: Commenter says: 

@Peter F. Mitigation will slow down but not avoid the consequences. And mass extinction in land and maritime ecosystems haven't been mitigated at all.

My response: 

@Roberthackel H. We are not in a Sixth Great Extinction event (or at least it's arguable). See “Earth in Not in the Midst of a Sixth Mass Extinction” by Peter Brannon in The Atlantic magazine (left wing!). Quoting Smithsonian anthropologist Doug Erwin:

"In fact, of the best-assessed groups of modern animals—like stony corals, amphibians, birds and mammals—somewhere between 0 and 1 percent of species have gone extinct in recent human history. By comparison, the hellscape of End-Permian mass extinction claimed upwards of 90 percent of all species on earth."

ADDED (ii): re comment above, that “mitigation will slow down but not avoid consequences”, I’d say that given the drop of 98% in deaths since 1920 — in a century when we did little if anything about reducing CO2 — is pretty much “avoiding” the consequences! We got better at avoiding them. I’ve seen his during my forty years in Hong Kong. When I first came here people used to die in typhoons. Then we moved people out of shanty towns. Now it’s rare for anyone to die in a typhoon. 

The same is true for financial costs. 

In a century of doing nothing but add CO2, we’ve reduced both the deaths from and financial costs of climate related disasters. 

Again, this is not to diminish the importance of reducing CO2 emissions, but to get a bit more real about the actual human and financial costs. We used to have regular famines. We don’t any more. Unless they are war-induced, as in Yemen.