Climate Change Is Making Natural Disasters Worse – Along with Our Mental Health
npr.org
npr.org
I don't understand this. If you look at global deaths from natural disasters, you'll see this has went down over the last 100 years with fewer large spikes. It makes sense considering modern buildings and cities are more resilient to climate events. [0]
Global deaths from natural disasters, 1900 to 2019
year | deaths
1900 | 1,270,000
2009 | 11,142
2010 | 317,757
2011 | 30,969
2012 | 9,732
2013 | 21,696
2014 | 7,959
2015 | 22,861
2016 | 8,681
2017 | 7,341
2018 | 10,809
2019 | 11,719
To put that into comparison, mosquitos kill 725k people per year. Snakes kill 50k, dogs kill 25k and freshwater snails kill 10k people. [1]
One number you often see thrown around is the number of climate events with $1 billion+ in damages, but that doesn't consider inflation and expanded development. For instance, if the same storm were to hit Florida today versus 20 years ago, you can bet the amount of damage that would be caused today would be much higher since there is so much more development there.
I think the main difference is the media focus on these events and the hopeless tone. For instance New Orleans was woefully unprepared for Katrina. They didn't build for a 100 year storm. It was almost criminal negligence. Something can and should be done to ensure people and property are safe from climate events in addition to reduction of carbon emissions and removal of carbon from the environment
[0] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-deaths-from-nat...
[1] https://www.statista.com/chart/2203/the-worlds-deadliest-ani...
“The slow cancellation of the future has been accompanied by a deflation of expectations. There can be few who believe that in the coming year a record as great as, say, the Stooges’ Funhouse or Sly Stone’s There’s A Riot Goin’ On will be released. Still less do we expect the kind of ruptures brought about by The Beatles or disco. The feeling of belatedness, of living after the gold rush, is as omnipresent as it is disavowed. Compare the fallow terrain of the current moment with the fecundity of previous periods and you will quickly be accused of ‘nostalgia’. But the reliance of current artists on styles that were established long ago suggests that the current moment is in the grip of a formal nostalgia, of which more shortly.
It is not that nothing happened in the period when the slow cancellation of the future set in. On the contrary, those thirty years has been a time of massive, traumatic change. In the UK, the election of Margaret Thatcher had brought to an end the uneasy compromises of the so-called postwar social consensus. Thatcher’s neoliberal programme in politics was reinforced by a transnational restructuring of the capitalist economy. The shift into so-called Post-Fordism – with globalization, ubiquitous computerization and the casualisation of labour – resulted in a complete transformation in the way that work and leisure were organised. In the last ten to fifteen years, meanwhile, the internet and mobile telecommunications technology have altered the texture of everyday experience beyond all recognition. Yet, perhaps because of all this, there’s an increasing sense that culture has lost the ability to grasp and articulate the present. Or it could be that, in one very important sense, there is no present to grasp and articulate anymore.”