By Jo Nova

To solve the increase in global disasters just axe the UN

Despite a galactic rise in Headlines of Doom, the world is a safer place than ever. The United Nations however is an absolute danger to our quality of life and our children’s mental health. They’ve shamelessly concocted the myth that disasters are increasing due to “climate change”.

NetZeroWatch report on a new paper on natural disasters and find that yearly deaths are down. Somehow satellites, phones, antibiotics, bulldozers and fire trucks are better at saving lives than horse drawn carts and hessian bags. From Alimonti and Mariani.:

Below the graph of natural disaster events shows a huge increase in the reporting of disasters, at least up until the turn of the century. But there is, if anything, a decline since then. There are three very different trends. But the giant bureaucratic sponge that is the United Nations can shamelessly draw a straight linear trend through this graph and tell the world that disasters are getting worse, even as they are obviously not.

In the last twenty years, humans have put out 40% of all the CO2 emissions they’ve ever put out since they lived in caves, but disasters have decreased 20%. It used to be that 20 year trends were enough to launch a new UN committee, but now the only trend-length that matters is the one that goes “up”.

Another pair of analysts  point out the CRED (Centre on the Epidemiology of Disasters) was only set up in 1973 and the EM-DAT database was only established in 1988. (Ritichie and Rosado).  Even the CRED team itself has warned people about reading too much into these trends, yet practically every separate wing of the UN has done exactly that. The FAO said “disaster events have increased from 100 per year in the 1970s to around 400 events per year worldwide in the past 20 years.” The UN Chief said “natural disasters have quadrupled since 1970.” The the UNFCC took his misinformation and repeated it. A few years ago the WMO said “The number of disasters has increased by a factor of five over the 50-year period.” The  BBC and The Economist lapped it up. Too many mistakes is never enough.

In 2019, the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) opined about the “‘staggering rise in climate-related disasters over the last twenty years’” proving only that lying UN agencies are a bigger threat to the science than the entire fossil fuel industry ever was.

The rise in all of these disasters is mostly because people got better at reporting disasters.  Back in 1901 if a cyclone landed in Ecuador, nobody rang up the UN, which didn’t exist, on phones that weren’t installed, to tell them about it. And when global population was five times smaller in 1900 tornados could wander the prairies and sometimes no one would notice. Droughts could strike rivers and unless the fish complained, who would know?

Suspiciously geophysical disasters (like earthquakes and volcanoes) have also increased “since 1900” and at about the same rate and with the same “break point” in the trend. Obviously our gas guzzling cars are not causing earthquakes and beef-steak doesn’t set off volcanoes. So the rapid increase in these sorts of disasters in the 1970s and 1980s supports the theory that the  rapid rise an artefact of data collection. There’s a lot more detail on that in the paper.

Meanwhile, the relentless good news on global crops continues.

If there really were more storms and frosts and devastating floods, you’d think the rice paddies and cornfields of the world would have noticed.

Yet here they go again, growing 2 to 4% more grain year after year.

Alimonti and Mariani don’t mince their words — the increase is just “better reporting”:

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 based on this claim.

The claim that the increase in disasters registered in EM-DAT in the final part of the twentieth century is mostly, if not completely, caused by better reporting and not by a real events increase, is supported by three independent lines of evidence: (a) several CRED reports (Guha-Sapir et al., 2004; Scheuren et al., 2008; CRED, 2015); (b) best fit analysis that found an important breakpoint and even a change in the trend sign of natural disasters at the beginning of the 21th century, in agreement with what is written and justified in point a; (c) the same trend change and breakpoint for geophysical disasters that have very little, if anything, to do with human activities or global warming.

But it’s also “better blindness”. If the BBC, the economist, and all the other sycophant agents of groupthink and power-mongers asked for “a graph” (with all the data) the facade would fall over in a week.

REFERENCES

Gianluca Alimonti & Luigi Mariani (2024) Is the number of global natural disasters increasing?, Environmental Hazards, vol 23: No 2, 186-202, DOI:
10.1080/17477891.2023.2239807

Emergency Events Database (EM-DAT) from the Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED).

Hannah Ritchie and Pablo Rosado (2024) – “Is the number of natural disasters increasing?” Published online at OurWorldInData.org.

The GWPF helpfully provides a list of references, including their work refuting these claims:

Essay by Eric Worrall

Is DeSmog trying to provide reasons for ordinary Britons to vote for Farage?

Nigel Farage’s Reform Party Has Accepted £2.3 Million from Fossil Fuel Interests, Climate Deniers, and Polluters Since 2019 Election

The anti-net zero party has been bankrolled by oil and gas investors, aviation entrepreneurs, and those who reject climate science.

By Adam Barnett and Sam Bright
on Jun 4, 2024 @ 04:35 PDT

Reform UK has received more than £2.3 million from oil and gas interests, highly polluting industries, and climate science deniers since December 2019, amounting to 92 percent of the party’s donations. 

…

In the past 12 months, Reform has received £200,000 from First Corporate Consultants. The firm is owned by Terence Mordaunt, a director and former chair of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), the UK’s leading climate science denial group. 

…

“No political party should be taking any money from fossil fuel interests whatsoever,” Caroline Lucas, until recently the Green Party MP for Brighton Pavilion, told DeSmog. 

…

Speaking on GB News in August 2021, Farage said that he was “very much an environmentalist” and that he couldn’t “abide things like plastics in our seas, pollution in our rivers.” However, on the issue of climate change, he added: “What annoys me though, is this complete obsession with carbon dioxide almost to the exclusion of everything else, the alarmism that comes with it, based on dodgy predictions and science.”

…

“The deniers are those who continually gaslight the public into thinking you can stop these powerful natural forces. We must use the energy under our feet, rather than send our money and jobs abroad.”

Read more: https://www.desmog.com/2024/06/04/nigel-farage-reform-uk-party-2-3-million-fossil-fuel-interests-climate-deniers-polluters-since-2019-election/

Imagine using anything former Green MP Caroline Lucas has to say as your yardstick for appropriate political conduct, after her censure for misuse of public resources for political fundraising.

DeSmog’s inference Farage is dancing to the tune of fossil fuel interests is absurd. It’s the other way around. Business people increasingly support Farage because they think Britain is being run by innumerate fools, who are leading the nation to ruin, and are clinging to the hope Farage will bring a return to Thatcher era economic sanity.

Anyone who ever met Nigel Farage in person knows straight away that Farage is not someone who compromises his principles.

I once had the privilege of a 20 minute one on one conversation with Nigel Farage. At the time Farage was campaigning hard in the leadup to a London Assembly election. I told him straight out I was leaving Britain, so there was no political advantage to be gained by talking to me. This was before I started writing for WUWT, so other than a few letters to the editor I didn’t have any public profile. But he found what I was saying interesting, so he hung out with me for 20 minutes and talked about politics. Farage is that kind of guy – human being first, politician a distant second.

DeSmog painting fossil fuel interests as universally unscrupulous and greedy is equally ridiculous.

Take Caudrilla Energy. Caudrilla CEO Francis Egan has been trying since 2007 to get a permit to extract the 6.5 billion cubic feet of frackable gas sitting under Lancashire.

Can you imagine hanging in there for 17 years with your business on hold, in the hope that one of the useless bureaucrats and politicians who infest Whitehall will find the guts to sign a piece of paper? Egan is not a young man, he’s near retirement age – he could die of old age before he gets that permit.

Does anyone seriously believe Egan slogged it out for 17 years, campaigning tirelessly to bring affordable energy to the British people, because he’s a greedy fossil fuel entrepreneur? He could easily have taken his skills and experience somewhere they would be appreciated, rather than waiting 17 years for a day which might never come.

Can you imagine how much lower heating bills would be, if some of those billions of cubic feet of natural gas were pushed into Lancashire’s gas network? People might actually be able to turn on their home heating without checking their bank balance first. I’m sure Egan can imagine this, and that this vision of a Britain where energy is affordable is what keeps Egan going – no other explanation makes sense.

DeSmog Blog also pushes the absurd claim that renewable energy is affordable.

People might have once fallen for the cheap renewable falsehood, but even with the far left government funded BBC in the green corner, the days when people in Britain took everything greens say at face value went up in flames along with their retirement savings, after prices went crazy following the Russian gas embargo.

If Caudrilla had been allowed to ramp up to full production a decade ago, if Britain was fully energy independent thanks to abundant supplies from local fracking, the Russian gas embargo would have had no impact on domestic British energy prices.

Farage’s Reform UK is the party with a rational plan to make Britain great again, by using fossil fuel windfall revenues to lower everyone elses taxes, and by flooding Britain’s gas network with affordable British energy, rather than exposing Britain to the uncertainties and high prices of the global energy market. No other mainstream British political party has a credible plan for achieving this. Perhaps we should thank DeSmog Blog for helping to publicise why a vote for Reform is a vote for lower home heating bills and better job prospects.