TITLE: The ten deadliest weather events of the last 20 years and how they were fuelled by climate change
https://news.sky.com/story/the-ten-deadliest-weather-events-of-the-last-20-years-and-how-they-were-fuelled-by-climate-change-13245299
EXCERPT: Climate change caused by humans fuelled all the ten deadliest weather events of the last two decades, analysis has found.
The ferocious cyclones, heatwaves, drought and flooding, including in Europe, have killed more than 570,000 people.
All were all made more intense and more likely in a hotter atmosphere, the World Weather Attribution (WWA) group at Imperial College London said as it marked its 10th anniversary.
Its research shows how scientists can detect the "fingerprint of climate change" in complex weather events - such as the recent deadly flooding in Spain.
"Climate change isn't a distant threat," said Dr Friederike Otto, co-founder and lead of World Weather Attribution.
"This study should be an eye-opener for political leaders hanging on to fossil fuels that heat the planet and destroy lives.
"If we keep burning oil, gas and coal, the suffering will continue."
The team analysed the ten deadliest weather events in the International Disaster Database since 2004. These were:
Bangladesh, Cyclone Sidr, 2007: 4,234 died
Myanmar, Cyclone Nargis, 2008: 138,366 died
Russia, heatwave, 2010: 55,736 died
Somalia, drought, 2010-2012: 258,000 died
Uttakarand, India, flood, 2013: 6,054 died
Philippines, Typhoon Haiyan, 2013: 7,354 died
France, heatwave, 2015: 3,275
Europe, heatwaves, 2022: 53,542
Europe, heatwaves, 2023: 37,129
The 2023 heatwave saw temperatures in the western Mediterranean that would have been "impossible" without climate change, it said. It showed how even a wealthy, well-resourced area was vulnerable.
The deadliest event was the drought in Somalia in which 258,000 people died. Crop failures led to famine.
Climate change had made the low rainfall more likely and intense, and made the drought worse by rising temperatures that licked more water from the land, WWA said.
The group warned the combined death toll is a "major underestimate", as millions more heat-related deaths likely went underreported in official statistics.
TITLE: Is the number of natural disasters increasing?
https://bigthink.com/the-present/more-natural-disasters/
EXCERPTS: If we want to reduce the risks of disasters, we need to track where they’re happening; what types of events they are; their human and economic impacts; and how these trends change over time.
High-quality data helps us see patterns in the data on factors such as increased resilience, climate change, and humanitarian response.
There are now several dedicated research groups that publish in-depth databases of disaster records.
One of the most widely cited is the International Disaster Database (EM-DAT) of the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED). It is open-access and free and lets anyone dig into the specific details of each recorded disaster. At Our World in Data, we rely on EM-DAT as our main data source for disasters. It’s also used by organizations such as the United Nations, World Meteorological Organization, UNFCCC, and many academic researchers.
But no disaster database is perfect. Data is incomplete. Its quality varies over time. And some events are either unreported or hard to quantify.
That’s why it’s important to understand the biases and limitations of data sources so that they can be interpreted usefully.
At least some of the observed increase in the number of reported disasters since 1900 is likely to result from increased reporting. Many medium-to-large events can be found in historical records, but smaller events with less damage or fatalities are missing.
Unsurprisingly, data coverage tended to be poorer in low-income countries where statistical capacity and reporting are more limited. From 2000 to 2019, only 13% of disasters in Africa and 23% in South Asia reported any economic losses.
Data for total deaths appeared to be much more complete. The Jones et al. (2022) paper reported that just 1.3% of events did not have death estimates recorded. We tried to replicate these estimates using the publicly available EM-DAT dataset. A much higher share of events had no data (i.e., blanks) for recorded deaths: 30% at the time of publication. However, since events in EM-DAT with zero deaths are also recorded as blanks, this estimate includes non-fatal events and those with genuine data gaps. It’s therefore difficult to give a concrete estimate for what share of events have real gaps in their death records.
Users of EM-DAT data should be aware of these potential gaps in data coverage. Particularly for lower-income countries and records from previous decades when reporting was much patchier.
One disaster category that is included in EM-DAT but is likely to be very patchy is extreme temperature. There are several reasons why.
First, the inequalities in reporting on heatwaves across regions are stark. Many regions have poor data coverage, and Sub-Saharan Africa is almost completely overlooked.
Over half of heat events in EM-DAT were reported across only 9 countries: Japan, India, Pakistan, the United States, France, Belgium, the United Kingdom, Spain, and Germany. It’s highly unlikely that these are the only countries experiencing extreme heat events. Such events are just not being recorded or estimated in other regions.
Second, proper quantification of the health effects of extreme temperatures is difficult. We often think about acute or very sudden deaths such as heat strokes. But most heat-related deaths come from an increase in the risk of less obvious conditions such as cardiovascular disease.5 These seemingly indirect deaths are not noted as being “heat-related” at the time and can only be estimated using various statistical methods later. This is true for both hot- and cold-related deaths.
There is an emerging literature that tries to quantify heat-related mortality — with projections into the future — but heat deaths are not always captured (at least not fully) in disaster databases.6
We therefore suggest caution when using heat death figures. Due to reporting biases, they are likely to be underestimates (for both cold and heat-related deaths) with large inequalities.
Failure to capture the indirect impacts of disasters
Disasters often have near-term and acute impacts on human mortality, health, and infrastructure. However, they can also lead to some indirect, medium-to-long-term impacts that are hard to capture.
This is often the case for events such as droughts, where indirect impacts such as malnutrition, food insecurity, and potential impacts of water shortages are harder to quantify — especially in an ongoing or very recent event. This is explained in more detail in the UNDRR’s Special Report on Drought 2021.
Therefore, users should know that disaster databases may fail to capture the full chain of disaster impacts.
TITLE: The Mass Deaths in Spain Aren’t Just a Natural Disaster
https://jacobin.com/2024/10/spain-disaster-floods-climate-denialism
EXCERPTS: Flash floods in Spain killed at least ninety-five people on Tuesday, leaving a trail of destruction across the country’s eastern coast. Dozens more people are still missing, while widely circulated images show a grim legacy of cars and bridges swept away by the deluges. At the center of the disaster was Valencia’s metropolitan area, the third largest in Spain, which received a year’s worth of rainfall in just eight hours.
According to meteorologists, the floods were due to a reoccurring dangerous weather system known as DANA, caused when a cold air front meets the Mediterranean’s warmer waters. Yet such phenomena have become more frequent and intense in recent years due to higher sea temperatures. “It seems clear that, with warmer waters each year, climate change is causing a radically different pattern of rainfall in the Mediterranean than we have known up to now,” noted daily newspaper El País’s former director Soledad Gallego-Díaz.
Yet the elevated death toll in Valencia also has to be understood in the context of a disastrous emergency management from the right-wing regional government — and companies’ insistence that their employees attend work. “Many of those who have died or have been injured were working at the time,” the country’s largest union, CCOO (Comisiones Obreras), highlighted. “[We] denounce the continuation of work when the risk of flooding was already known.”
Hundreds of employees were trapped overnight Tuesday in an IKEA outlet and the massive Bonaire shopping mall in Valencia, as floodwaters rose to dangerous levels. “The people who have kept us here working, without closing, are our supervisors,” one employee explained in a video posted on social media. “They didn’t let us leave. They have gambled with our lives.”
A further eight hundred workers in an industrial park were trapped in precarious conditions, with many having to climb onto the roofs of warehouses to escape danger. From there, some called their families to say goodbye in what they believed to be their final hours. They were later rescued. In other dramatic footage, a supermarket delivery driver was rescued by a helicopter as his truck was semisubmerged in water — with much of the media blurring the well-known corporate logo of Mercadona in photos so as to avoid reputational damage to the Spanish company. Like many others, it decided to keep its workers in the field even after the country’s national meteorological office issued a red alert for extreme weather that morning.
In this respect, the Valencia floods offer a tragic example of what it means when unscrupulous bosses, vicious neoliberalism, and policies of far-right denialists intersect with a climate-related disaster. As journalist Daniel Bernabé notes, “Putting profit before life is not permissible, but it also explains the principles that govern our society.”
This was a point further underscored by images inside of an outsourced public nursing home that showed elderly people desperately wading through floodwaters, with few if any staff members visible. Six residents died in the home, which is one of twenty-two run by the corrupt construction magnet Enrique Ortiz.
Yet beyond that, questions are being asked why emergency protocols were not put into place in time. In particular, the hard-right regional government is coming under fierce criticism for its failure to issue a civil protection alert to residents’ cell phones until 8:15 p.m. on Tuesday evening — by which time thousands were already trapped by rising floodwaters. “If the Valencian government had activated and communicated the alert — which inevitably reaches every citizen in possession of a cell phone — earlier, there would probably have been fewer deaths,” insisted left-wing former minister Alberto Garzón.
Premier Carlos Mazón, of the right-wing Partido Popular, also waited until 8:30 p.m. to formally request the assistance of the national Military Emergency Unit and resisted calling a state of emergency as it would have meant handing over authority to the central government in Madrid, headed by Pedro Sánchez’s broad-left coalition. He also tweeted at noon Tuesday that the worst of the storm would have passed by 6 p.m.
In part, this reflected his administration’s broader laissez faire approach to climate change, with his coalition government agreement with the far-right Vox in 2023 including the elimination of the recently set up Valencian Emergency Response Unit. As journalist Antonio Maestre wrote on Wednesday, that one of Mazón’s first executive actions was to abolish that unit “conveys the message that nothing is wrong, that the climate crisis will not affect us and that there is no need to worry about what that paradigm shift entails of the lives of thousands of people.”
Vox pulled out of Mazón’s administration this summer over the existential threat that unaccompanied migrant children supposedly pose to law and order in Spain. Yet in the days leading up to the floods, the online alt-right heaped scorn on the meteorological office’s repeated warnings of expected extreme rainfall. Even in the immediate aftermath, Vox officials gave voice to conspiracy theories circulating in social media, which claimed that the current broad-left national government has removed hundreds of dams built under dictator Francisco Franco.
SEE ALSO:
Trump’s Environmental Claims Ignore Decades of Climate Science
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/29/climate/donald-trump-climate-change-claims.html
Health Risks Due to Climate Change Are Rising Dangerously, Lancet Report Concludes
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/30102024/climate-change-health-risks-rising-dangerously/