The Astonishing Toll of Global Warming

A guest post over at Watts Up With That on the how deaths due to weather related causes have declined from 1900 through the present, the era of global warming. 

The graph at the right gets straight to the heart of the matter. As the globe as warmed over the last 100 years, deaths due to weather related causes has dropped dramatically:

1. Deaths and death rates from droughts, which were responsible for approximately 60% of cumulative deaths due to extreme weather events from 1900–2010, are more than 99.9% lower than in the 1920s.
2. Deaths and death rates for floods, responsible for over 30% of cumulative extreme weather deaths, have declined by over 98% since the 1930s.
3. Deaths and death rates for storms (i.e. hurricanes, cyclones, tornados, typhoons), responsible for around 7% of extreme weather deaths from 1900–2008, declined by more than 55% since the 1970s.

As the stock prospectus says "past performance is not proof of future performance", but it does give one reason to question cries about how doom is at hand if the earth should happen warm another degree or two.

An alarmist commenter correctly notes that much of this decrease is due to the increase in technology and civilization over that period.  What he fails to note is that this technology and civilization has been built on the back of energy consumption, largely fossil fuel.

And it would really piss me off if warming were to raise the temperature of Maryland to the temperature of, say, South Carolina, and bring snook and tarpon in to the Bay.