21st Century Global Disasters
By Paul Homewood
Roger Pielke Jr on disaster trends:
A new peer-reviewed paper out this week by Alimonti and Mariani asks whether global disasters have increased. Their answer is that they have not (and if the name sounds familiar, it is the same Alimonti whose paper is being improperly retracted — more fresh info on that in the coming days).
As I read their paper today I noticed that the time series they reported from the EM-DAT database looked a bit different than that I had last explored and presented here at THB late last year. So today I downloaded the most recent data from EM-DAT, and indeed there has been some changes to the most recent three years, presumably due to late entries into the database (however I will enquire as all post-hoc dataset updates should be documented). EM-DAT has been funded since the late 1990s by the U.S. Agency for International Development.
Below is the updated time series of global hydrological, climatological and meteorological disasters in the EM-DAT database, along with the linear trend, over the period 2000 to 2022.
Full post here.
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
Sorry to say, once a good idea, but UN and its sub org’s have become ‘Gollum and the Goblins’ …
The UN has been saving Africa for the last 6 decades yet despite it having had billions of taxpayer cash, it still functions to impoverish Africa, most recently by trying to foist nut zero green conology upon them – developing nations need a secure energy pathway to prosperity, using their own fossil fuels, as the west did
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_abuse_by_UN_peacekeepers#:~:text=The%20report%20further%20found%20that,much%20greater%20than%20originally%20thought.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/documentary/un-sex-abuse-scandal/
I would love a “+1 key … so take this as +1”
As RP says: ‘EM-DAT explains clearly that the increase in disasters in its database to 2000 is due to better reporting, and not changes in underlying counts of actual disasters.’
Similarly to the ‘increase’ in hurricanes since the advent of satellite imagery allowing hurricanes to be ‘discovered’ that will never reach a coast, and would only have been recorded if a ship happened to sail across their path in the open ocean. We’re _seeing_ more hurricanes, but the weather isn’t _making_ more hurricanes.
Funny how a simple ‘space can completely change the meaning of a phrase: ‘and not changes under lying counts…’.
What changes a disaster into a global disaster?
The fire in Lahaina seemed pretty localized.
WWII is the only global disaster I can think of.
Lahaina was most certainly a local disaster for the residents, but it had a wider resonance for those of us who had visited and enjoyed the location
True. I stayed at the Pioneer Inn a generation ago.
I breakfasted at the Lahaina Inn back along 😎
Having checked it was in 1975. Doesn’t time fly……!! 😳
Lahaina – never heard of it. Suppose Dalbeattie burned down. Would folk in Hawaii know where that was?
Lahaina gets 2,000,000 visitors a year. What you got for Dalbeattie?
“Lahaina is a location that is experienced by two million people, or approximately 80% percent of all of Maui tourism, per year.”
Lahaina was the capital of the Hawaian Kingdom from 1820 – 1845. Dalbeattie was the birthplace of the First Officer on Titanic. So, very similar: Not!
WW1 and The Seven Years war were both global, and pretty disastrous for many involved
The Plague, the little ice-age. The spread of measles and similar diseases to the Americas and Australia. The spread of Homo Sapiens about 60,000 years ago had a pretty dire impact on Neanderthals. The spread of farming, likewise was the death knell to most hunter-gatherer communities.
The industrialisation of slave trading, was a global phenomenon which (added to infectious diseases) destroyed the Americas and Africa.
ABBA … come on … after that sobering list, I need a bit of fun.
The only disaster I see unfolding these days is the green nut zero con – guaranteed to plunge the west into needing foreign aid from the east
Absolutely correct.
An entirely beneficial if trivial increase in global temperatures and in the miniscule atmospheric concentration of a trace gas essential to all life on earth has been transmogrified into a Catastrophe.
Well done, mendacious and malevolent GangGreen Barstewards.
Well, it’s just a variation of what the Christian missionaries once did in Africa (extortion). In the end, it’s all about exploitation of “inferior” cultures.
Respond to devonblueboy.
Sorry, energywise it is …
Whereas post-independence Africa has been SUCH a wonderful success.
Almost a wonderful as Haiti and Liberia and Ethiopia that escaped the horrors of Empire.
Strange that places like Singapore, India and Hong Kong (until China took over) did pretty well, “exploited” or not.
Back in the early 1990s the Kenyan newspaper ‘The Nation’ had an editorial making the same point you have made. It looked at the mess made, post independence, in the ex British colonies in Africa and suggested that the old colonial structures be brought back!
True. Africa would be in a much better place today if the British Empire hadn’t collapsed after WW2. This point was once made to me by an African who accused Britain of deserting them and handing them over to a bunch of gangsters (independence).
The title of the paper (Is the number of global natural disasters increasing?) is another typical example of Betteridge’s law of headlines.
Of course the answer is “No”. If is was “Yes”, they would have used a scary headline.
There is an active attempt to rewrite history by all sorts of global boiling fanatics.
Historical temperature records are being removed from the likes of Wikipedia etc and replaced by this hottest evah years supposed record breaking temperatures.
Even the meteorological media experts are complicit, as they should know better, but don’t bother to check and at best say Historical records are unreliable.
Where are the Cat 5 Hurricanes attacking the coasts of the U.S.A. when you need them?
Actually, where are the Cat 1 Hurricanes?
https://www.tropicaltidbits.com/
The Weather Channel hyperventilated over the temperature of the tropical North Atlantic two months ago. Unprecedented! Hottest evah!
Nothing happened. Two tropical storms petered out. Nothing since. Very quiet hurricane season. Yawn.
Their objective is not to inform. It is to indoctrinate.
I complained to the BBC previously about the WMO report claiming 50 year increase. I pointed out the issue that the EM-DAT was only useful from 2000. They were either too stupid too understand or deliberately obtuse. The real story of course is why the WMO would make such a claim. The BBC hide behind the line that they are “just reporting the WMO”.
At the end of the full Pielke article (hit to stop the pop-up blocker) he has a sentence which echoes my view on attributing wildfires, floods etc to climate change:
“Regardless what happens with trends in disaster counts, it is absolutely essential to remember that if you are looking for a signal of changes in climate — always look directly at weather and climate data, not data on economic or human impacts.”
Exactly.
“…too stupid to understand or deliberately obtuse.”
Too committed to the sacred “Cause.”
Apparently, the actuaries know something the B.B.C. does not:
Click to access pubs_forum_18spforumv2_05_collins.pdf
Pielke quote is excellent.
‘Dr’ Harrabin has a letter published in today’s DT!! Poseur.
“Poseur.”
“Winner of the Mrs. Grabber award for Raffia work, St. Custard’s, 1955.”
Part of the CV of Nigel Molesworth, Esq.
And it wasn’t even true!
‘However, the completely false notion that global weather and climate disasters have increased and will continue to increase is commonly reported in the legacy media, buoyed by the promotion of false information by organizations that include the United Nations.’
I know what a weather disaster is. Maybe (see below). But WTF is a ‘climate disaster?!?!’ Climate is the generalized weather of an area or region. How can there be a generalized disaster?
It appears that a ‘disaster’ is whatever they want it to be. Like “heat wave.” Whatever supports the current narrative.
‘So today I downloaded the most recent data from EM-DAT, and indeed there has been some changes to the most recent three years’
Good point, Gamecock. TPTB need to make ‘climate’ a scary word by association. The other thing is get public recognition if the concept, especially in leading news papers and outlets. That way, they get to use the news itens as supporting the original ‘theses’. Same trick as was used by shady science papers x-referencing each other.
The word ‘climate.’
I am pretty sure this was only a technical word when I was young. If somebody was thinking of going to Majorca on holiday, they would ask, “What is the (usual) weather [sic] in August?” “Hot and dry!”
Climate IS in some sense the average of the weather; but that sense is the typical weather in each month compared to the typical weather of other months. “What is the climate [sic] in Majorca?” “Hot, dry summers; warm, with occasional storms, winters.” How hot is hot?” “Often reaches 40 C in July and August.”
“What is the climate of [sic] the whole year?” “There is no such thing.”
In my geography lessons, in the early 60s, my only memory of the word ‘climate’ was in relation to the UK having a “temperate one”!!
Dave, Wladimir Köppen cleared it up in 1884 with publication of his climate classification system, later adjusted by Rudolf Geiger.
Climate had been well understood for over a hundred years, til ‘climate scientists’ started helping.
I see Charles was ‘horrified’ by the deaths in Hawaii, which is a reasonable response. However, he doesn’t appear to give a monkey’s about people dying of cold in his own country. More than 3,000 people are “needlessly” dying each year in the UK because they cannot afford to properly heat their homes, new research has revealed.
I think the number is way higher, like 10,000.
Perhaps Guterres is thinking of global boiled frog syndrome?