Fewer deaths by natural disasters, no thanks to Mother Nature

Despite Mother Nature's consistent efforts to kill people, flood land and burn forests, wipe out crops, shake us with earthquakes and toast us with volcanoes, innovative technology and engineering has produced a significant decline in deaths per hundred thousand people globally over the last hundred years. [Note: Going back much further can be problematic in securing accurate data.]

With 24x7 global reporting and the internet, the raw count of "natural disasters"grows as our data about the world increases, so this has to be considered, just as the fact that most of the reliable (if it exists at all) temperature data for the last two hundred years used in "climate" research comes from a small fraction of land (and none usually from the 75% of the surface that is oceans), mostly from the United States, western Europe and Australia.

As I noted in the opening passages of my managing sustainable development manuscript, sustainability means more than "protecting" the planet from humans; it also means to sustain human existence and, to be fair, to improve man's existence. And the most important "renewable" resources are oxygen, trees, and crops, and not just the modern ideas of renewable energy, including solar and wind power. As Matt Ridley points out, we have more green now than we did a hundred years ago, just as North America has twice the number of trees as it had two hundred years ago. Or as Norman Borlaug showed us, we have more food per person that we ever did, in contrast with Maltusiasn claims that population growth would outgrow food production. Today, obesity is more of a threat to life -- as further strongly recently evidenced by the incidence of high BMI among Covid deaths -- than is starvation. Just count deaths attributable to weight-related, lifestyle-induced diseases, maladies and co-morbidities.