During our discussion of the preposterous news story from
Pravda, claiming this headline: “Earth begins to kill people for
changing its climate” a scientist dropped in to provide us some
insight into his latest paper. It was highly relevant at the
time since one of the repeating themes we see in the mainstream
(and not so mainstream) media is the attribution of increasing
death due to severe weather events to “global warming”. But that
is not supported by the real data, it is a false premise. In the
paper, Indur Goklany examines the worldwide trends and makes
some surprising discoveries base of examining data from the
World Health Organization, NOAA, and other sources. Some have
claimed that, all else being equal, climate change will increase
the frequency or severity of weather-related extreme events
(see, e.g., IPCC 2001; Patz 2004; MacMichael and Woodruff 2004).
This study examines whether losses due to such events (as
measured by aggregate deaths and death rates2) have increased
globally and for the Unite