Death & Death Rates Due to Extreme Weather Events
by Indur M. Goklany
Despite the recent spate of deadly extreme weather events – such as the 2003 European heat wave and the 2004 and 2005 hurricane seasons in the USA – aggregate mortality and mortality rates due to extreme weather events are generally lower today than they used to be.
Globally, mortality and mortality rates have declined by 95 percent or more since the 1920s. The largest improvements came from declines in mortality due to droughts and floods, which apparently were responsible for 93 percent of all deaths caused by extreme events during the 20th Century. For windstorms, which, at 6 percent, contributed most of the remaining fatalities, mortality rates are also lower today but there are no clear trends for mortality. Cumulatively, the declines more than compensated for increases due to the 2003 heat wave.
With regard to the U.S., current mortality and mortality rates due to extreme temperatures, tornados, lightning, floods and hurricanes are also below their peak levels of a few decades ago. The declines in annual mortality for the last four categories range from 62 to 81 percent, while mortality rates declined 75 to 95 percent.
If extreme weather has indeed become more extreme for whatever reason, global and U.S. declines in mortality and mortality rates are perhaps due to increases in societies’ collective adaptive capacities. This enhanced adaptive capacity is associated with a variety of interrelated factors – greater wealth, increases in technological options, and greater access to and availability of human and social capital – although luck may have played a role. Because of these developments, nowadays extreme weather events contribute less than 0.06 percent to the global and U.S. mortality burdens in an average year, and seem to be declining in general. Equally important, mortality due to extreme weather events has declined despite an increase in all-cause mortality, suggesting that humanity is adapting better to extreme events than to other causes of mortality. In summary, there is no signal in the mortality data to indicate increases in the overall frequencies or severities of extreme weather events, despite large increases in the population at risk.
Dr. Indur M. Goklany has worked on environmental and energy policy issues for over three decades in federal and state governments, and the private sector. He has written over one hundred monographs, book chapters and papers on topics ranging from climate change, human well-being, economic development, technological change, and biotechnology to sustainable development.
He has worked for the U.S. Department of the Interior, which manages 20 percent of the U.S. land area, and associated mineral, energy and water resources, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the State of Michigan. He is the winner of the 2007 Julian Simon Prize. He was a visiting fellow with the American Enterprise Institute, and the Julian Simon Fellow at the Property and Environment Research Center in Bozeman, Montana. He has represented the U.S. at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and in the negotiations leading to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. His degrees, all in electrical engineering, are from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, and Michigan State University..
He is the author of Clearing the Air: The Real Story of the War on Air Pollution, and The Precautionary Principle, and The Improving the State of the World, all published by the Cato Institute. Opinions and views expressed by Dr. Goklany are his alone, and not necessarily of any institution with which he is associated.
