By Paul Homewood
https://files.emdat.be/reports/2024_EMDAT_report.pdf
Yes, it’s the new Disaster Report from the CRED.
In true BBC fashion, they would like you to think that weather disasters have never been as bad, all due to global warming of course!
But dip deeper into their report and you find that annual deaths last year were well below the 20 year average:
Even after excluding deaths from earthquakes, which obviously skews the numbers because of the 2004 Tsunami, the 2024 death rate has still halved.
In the longer term, of course, modern day deaths from disasters are a tiny fraction of the past:
https://ourworldindata.org/natural-disasters
In terms of economic losses, 2024 showed a slight increase over some recent years, but the trend in real terms is if anything downwards:
https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/climate-change-is-showing-its-claws
While CRED’s glossy report is eye catching, they could have published something similar for any other year in the past you can think to name.