The newly-released 2022 Disasters in numbers report from CRED (Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters) is even more dishonest than its 2021 report, claims retired Associate Professor of Physics Dr. Ralph Alexander. The most egregious statements are said to involve the death toll from weather-related disasters. According to CRED’s own emergency events database EM-DAT, mortality is 98% lower today than a century earlier. But a ”more careful examination” of mortality statistics is said to indicate this percentage may be misleading. “Misinterpreting statistics could be harmful if it supports a discourse minimising the importance of climate change,” it notes.
The massive 98% fall over 100 years in weather-related disaster deaths – widely quoted, but inconvenient in promoting climate fears – is shown in figure A below.
But figure B tells a different story. CRED removes the 50 largest disaster events, and then claims deaths show a “positive trend” over the last century. As a results of these manipulations, CRED feels able to note that, “it is impossible to draw conclusions about the underlying causes of the century-long trend in disaster mortality based on EM-DAT numbers alone.” Dr. Alexander has a different take on the matter. “Such subterfuge is both dishonest and statistically flawed… the only way to present any trend honestly is to include all the data.” A fundamental tenet of the scientific method, he continued, is that you cannot ignore any piece of evidence that doesn’t fit your narrative, simply because it is inconvenient.
CRED is based at the University of Louvain in Belgium and its annual disasters report is published with America’s largest foreign aid organisation, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). The work of CRED is widely used, and its EM-DAT service is said to provide “objective evidence-based information”. It is noted that this can be used to assess the vulnerabilities of communities to disasters, “thus assisting policymakers in setting priorities”.
On the report’s front page a total of 30,704 deaths are linked to “climate in action” – an odd linkage since the report includes 1,626 fatalities arising from earthquakes and six from volcanic activity, which are hardly from ‘climate’. The 2022 figure was three times higher than in 2021, but below the 2002-2021 average of 60,955 deaths. But, observes Dr. Alexander, the report goes on to state that the 2002-2021 average is influenced by a “few mega disasters”. A “more useful” comparison, suggests CRED, is that the 2022 toll is almost twice the 2002-2021 median of 16,011 deaths. Of course picking the median, the number in the middle of all the data, reeks of cherry-picking. But Dr. Alexander prefers to widen his criticism by noting that yearly death tolls are unrelated independent events in the language of statistics, “so assigning any statistical significance to the 30,704 deaths in 2022 being lower than the long-term average, or higher than the long-term median, is invalid. CRED’s attempt to fit its data to a narrative emphasising ‘the importance of climate action’ falls flat”.
Publicising Dr. Alexander’s work, the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) said CRED’s latest disasters report features “crudely manipulated data”. GWPF director Dr. Benny Peiser claimed that Dr. Alexander had shown that the authors of Disaster in numbers had bent over backwards to provide support for the narrative of climate doom, “when the data and trends of weather-related disasters are pointing in the opposite direction”. All the parties involved, he continued, “should be ashamed of what is appearing in their name. This publication is fatally flawed and should be withdrawn”.
CRED does valuable work in compiling data on worldwide disasters. But Dr. Alexander’s trenchant criticisms highlight the malign influence cast by a political narrative promoting the collectivist Net Zero agenda. It seems that every scrap of statistical data must be aligned to promote the idea that humans are destroying the climate by burning fossil fuel.
Last year, the former science under-secretary in the Obama administration, Steven Koonin published a book about climate titled Unsettled, in which he noted that scientific institutions “seem more concerned with making the science fit the narrative, than ensuring the narrative fits the science”. Furthermore, “the general lack of knowledge of what science actually says, the drama of extreme weather events… all work against balanced coverage in the popular media”. The culprit for all this “misinformation in the service of persuasion” is not some secret cabal, “but rather a self-reinforcing alignment of perspectives and interests”.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
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We need a new word for these people, because they aren’t “scientists”. Shameless, lying propagandists, although more accurate, is too long and doesn’t roll off the tongue.
Avoiding the Anglo Saxon slang you mean?
How about “Lying, venal bar stewards”?
An inCREDible misuse of statistics that totally disCREDits these so-called scientists.
For example in the ’20s some 4.75M deaths are ignored out of 5M to arrive at this piece of propaganda.
Torture the data for long enough and it confess to anything. I don’t think any type of data in history has been persecuted and tortured more than climate and temperature data has been. ————- Manipulating data allows you to see what isn’t there. The idea that any extreme weather event can be linked to human caused global warming is NOT supported by the evidence. For much of the general public who see every bit of bad weather from anywhere in the world beamed into their living rooms 24 hours a day via cable TV, it probably feels true that humans are altering the climate and that is a perception they may have. But that is all it is —-a “perception”. In the real world there is no increase in the frequency or intensity of any type of weather event.
“A bad system will beat a good person every time” – Edward Deming
“If there is something very slightly wrong in our definition of the theories, then the full mathematical rigor may convert these errors into ridiculous conclusions.” R. Feynman
“Whenever there is fear, you will get wrong figures.” – Edward Deming
thanks
What a disappointment science has become. As Koonin puts it, ‘making the science fit the narrative as opposed to the narrative fitting the science’ I would call that anti-science in the climate ponzi scheme.
NASA is looking to put the first women and ‘person of colour’ on the Moon. Just foxtrot oscar!
The icing on the cake is this covid debacle. In all probability science caused this mess through a lab leak, and then science thinks they can solve the problem with the so called vaccines, that turned out well.
Today’s scientists are not fit to lick the boots of their predecessors.
“Science” is the genuine search for truth no matter where it leads. But what we have now in these politicised issues is “Official Science”, that is the science wheeled out in support of public policy, since most people are reluctant to challenge science or scientists, and when things go wrong politicians can claim they were merely following the science.
Correct, Varmint.
Although, to be nit pickky, it isn’t just ‘science’ that they follow. It is ‘The Science’ or, for emphasis, ‘THE SETTLED Science’.
Making them the very willing victim of the most egregious charlatans that our Civil Servants can find.
Think Boris and his annointed chums Pantsdown Ferguson and CCP Michie, just for a start.
The Science ™.
Very true. I studied climatology at university back in the early eighties. At the time, the data was showing that we were heading towards another ice age…. I guess they use different historical climate data these days / sarc.
I still take a great interest in climatology and do not accept the theory that greenhouse gas emissions caused by man’s activities are the primary cause of changes in climate. When attempting to discuss this with the indoctrinated people who get their information from MSM and Social Media, a popular retort is “so you know better than all the scientists?”.
Changing mindsets is a real struggle and I don’t see it getting any easier..
Yes I hear that a lot——–“So you think you know better than the scientists”? ———But when you ask people “What scientists are you referring to? They usually cannot name any. But what they also fail to understand is that most of this isn’t science. It is computer modelling. ——-Models are NOT science. It only needs one of the parameters in the model to be out a little and the final output from the model will be way out, which is ofcourse why all of the climate models do not match what is happening in the real world and why models and observations are drifting further and further apart as each year goes by.
The idea of removing obvious outliers before calculating averages is principally sound. But not in this case, because the claim is that such outliers aren’t outliers anymore but instead occurring ever more frequently. A statement like When ignoring all actual extreme weather events, we find that the death toll of extreme weather events has increased makes no sense. The second graphic is thus more something like Massive population growth resulted in a massive growth of people dying for unremarkable reasons. That’s certainly true. But not something supporting the claim of imminent doom unless …
The inconvenient truth is that the world is experiencing one of its most stable era’s of geologically recorded history ever! We should be honoured to live in such a temperate time not slagging it off!
The climate change industry is very lucrative and some do not want their jobs and grants to stop, so they perpetuate the idea of a ‘Climate Change Crisis’.