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| Deaths per thousand, within a 400km radius of the centre of the weather event |
Highlights
• We quantified the dynamics of socio-economic vulnerability to climate-related hazards.
• A decreasing trend in both human and economic vulnerability is evident.
• Global average mortality and loss rates have dropped by 6.5 and nearly 5 times, respectively, from 1980 to 1989 to 2007–2016.
• Results also show a clear negative relation between vulnerability and wealth.
ADDED: Relevant to the post immediately before this, below.
This puts paid the idea that "we are going to witness climate catastrophes across the world, unless we decarbonise immediately and drastically".
Because the major drops in human fatalities and of economic costs across the world have happened even as we have continued to pump Co2 into the atmosphere.
Fatalities due to weather events have dropped 95% since 1920. The economic cost of weather events is down to around $7.5 billion. That's 0.006% of current world GDP of $117 Trillion.
To claim that "we're in for disaster, deaths and record economic costs" is patently falsified by the data.
Not to say we shouldn't be worried about pumping ever more Co2 into the atmosphere. And we are trying to reduce emissions.
The point of this post and of linking to the above study, is that even if we do not manage to meaningfully reduce emissions, we are not in for any sort of "catastrophe" in terms of either of people killed in "extreme weather events".
Both of these -- people killed in "extreme weather events" -- are going down. The richer the economy, the more down they go.
We are getting better and better at handling them. We know that if we get richer, we get even better at doing so; therefore the aim ought to be to enrich poor countries, not stifle their growth by making them adhere to Net Zero carbon emission pathways.
There are many more graphs and charts at the site of the paper:
The study is: Empirical Evidence of Declining Global Vulnerability to Climate-Related Hazards. Formetta and Feyen. July 2019
