Natural disasters

Number of papers: 6

Is the number of global natural disasters increasing? — Environmental Hazards, 2023; Alimonti & Mariani

“We analyze temporal trends in the number of natural disasters reported since 1900 in the Emergency Events Database (EM-DAT) from the Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED). … We conclude that the patterns observed are largely attributable to progressively better reporting of natural disaster events, with the EM-DAT dataset now regarded as relatively complete since ∼2000. The above result sits in marked contradiction to earlier analyses by two UN bodies (FAO andUNDRR), which predicts an increasing number of natural disasters and impacts in concert with global warming. Our analyses strongly refute this assertion as well as extrapolations published by UNDRR basedon this claim.”

Increasing Cold Weather Extremes since the New
Millennium: An Assessment with a Focus on Worldwide
Economic Impacts — Modern Environmental Science and Engineering, 2020; E. Ray Garnett and Madhav L. Khandekar

“Since the new Millennium, numerous cold weather extremes (CWE) accompanied by heavy snow falls have been witnessed which have inflicted substantial economic losses worldwide. Among some of the notable cold weather extremes in Canada in the last five years have been: several heavy winter snowfalls in eastern Canada during 2015–2017, one of the heaviest snowfalls in recorded history in Vancouver and vicinity during December 2016 and the Calgary (Alberta) floods linked to sudden melting of heavy snow accumulation during the winter of 2013. These and many other such extreme cold events have inflicted heavy economic losses locally as well as on the regional scale in eastern and western Canada. This paper examines CWE in Canada and elsewhere and assesses their economic impacts.”

Politics of attributing extreme events and disasters to climate change — WIREs Climate Change, 2021; Lahsen & Ribot

Climate change is the scapegoat. Urban growth, bad planning, poor management, and politics cause the damage.

Global, regional, and national burden of mortality associated with non-optimal ambient temperatures from 2000 to 2019: a three-stage modelling study — The Lancet, 2021; Zhao et al.

“The large sample size and its representativeness improved the generalisability of our results. We found that 5,083,173 deaths were associated with non-optimal temperatures per year, accounting for 9·43% of all deaths and equating to 74 excess deaths per 100 000 residents. Most of these excess deaths were explainable by cold temperatures.”

Mortality attributable to hot and cold ambient temperatures in India: a nationally representative case-crossover study — Plos Medicine, 2018; Fu et al.

“For all examined causes, moderately cold temperature was estimated to have higher attributable risks (6.3% [95% empirical confidence interval (eCI) 1.1 to 11.1] for all medical deaths, 27.2% [11.4 to 40.2] for stroke, 9.7% [3.7 to 15.3] for IHD, and 6.5% [3.5 to 9.2] for respiratory diseases) than extremely cold, moderately hot, and extremely hot temperatures.”

A critical assessment of extreme events trends in times of global warming — European Physical Journal Plus, 2021; Alimonti et al.

Conclusion: “None of these response indicators show a clear positive trend of extreme events. In conclusion on the basis of observational data, the climate crisis that, according to many sources, we are experiencing today, is not evident yet.”