The Christmas classic by Frank Sinatra tells us that the weather outside if frightful. The United Nations Office for Disaster Reduction (UNDRR) tells us the same thing and uses a chart showing the incidence of natural disasters to underpin its assertions. Frank Sinatra’s statement may have been true, but the UNDRR’s version is not true and is in my view designed to mislead.
The nature of the statistical fraud being used was first exposed by a group of Italian scientists lea by Gianluca Alimonti and Luigi Mariani who concluded that “on the basis of observational data, the climate crisis that, according to many sources, we are experiencing today, is not evident yet”. Their original paper of November 2021 was retracted under a highly politicised process, but they issued a related paper which was accepted in July 2023. Their basic insight was that looking for a trend in the total number of weather events recorded over a long period cannot generate meaningful results as the phenomenal increase in recording technology and population growth would inevitably increase the number of recorded events. They showed that when you started splitting recorded weather events into different categories of severity then there was no meaningful increase in the number of severe events over time. Their logic was that the recording capacity of severe weather events was more or less constant over time and if there were genuine trends then they should be noticeable in severe weather events.
The chart that UNDRR refers to shows the incidence of natural disasters by year for events recorded in the EM-DAT database, maintained by the Centre for Research on Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED). The chart below shows the number of natural disasters per year taken from EM-DAT:
Wow! On the face of it this looks pretty bad and the UNDRR report goes on to extrapolate out the trend from 1970 in order to predict a rapidly increasing number of disasters going forward.
God Bless You and Your Families!
Love,
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