Climate-Related Deaths Are Down 97.5% Since 1920

Adverse consequences of climate-related disasters can be mitigated through human ingenuity.

Last month, the Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal from a group of minors who have long sought to compel the federal government to take action on climate change.

Originally filed in 2015 by 21 children and teenagers, the lawsuit argued that federal energy policies violated their constitutional rights, including the fundamental rights to life, liberty, personal security, dignity, bodily integrity, and cultural and religious practices.

For a generation raised to believe that climate change is the greatest threat facing mankind, the decision was no doubt a blow. Yet I have words of hope for those afraid: climate-related deaths have plummeted over the last century.

This claim might be surprising to people who’ve come to believe that climate change is a greater threat than nuclear war, but it’s true.

The International Disaster Database is a dataset comprised of more than 26,000 mass disasters since 1900, and it is maintained by the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters at the University of Louvain in Brussels. It shows climate-related deaths have fallen 97.5% since 1920. (Other sources agree.)

If you doubt this, I’ll point out that even those who believe that climate change is a human crisis concede this fact, as Reuters did in this 2023 fact check.

“The death toll is falling because of improved forecasts and early warnings, and more coordinated risk and disaster management and response,” a World Meteorological Organization spokesman told the news agency.

This is no doubt true, although other unnamed factors almost certainly played a role, such as improvements in medicine and other lifesaving technologies. But that’s the whole point: Adverse consequences of climate disasters can be mitigated with human ingenuity.

Those who argue climate change is a “crisis” have difficulty acknowledging this fact. Many would rather call climate crisis skeptics “deniers” or accuse them of spreading misinformation.

Indeed, the very Reuters article that admits climate-related deaths have plummeted states that this is “not evidence against a climate ‘emergency.’

“Disaster mortality is not a useful metric for quantifying climate change,” the fact check states.

There are two problems with this claim.

First, saying that disaster mortality is an unuseful metric for understanding climate change is an opinion, not a fact. Having opinions is perfectly fine, but Reuters was conducting a fact check. (And pointing out that climate-related deaths have plummeted over the last century is a fact, not an opinion.)

Second, those who believe climate change is a crisis have little problem using disaster mortality figures when the numbers tell the story they want.

The World Economic Forum projects that “by 2050 climate change may cause an additional 14.5 million deaths.”

The New York Times also gets in on the game, reporting on a World Health Organization study that projected “250,000 deaths annually from 2030 to 2050” because of climate change.

Ditto with Forbes, which shared figures from a Nature Communications study that claimed climate change would result in 83 million excess deaths.

And then there’s Reuters …

Disaster mortality seems to be a perfectly useful metric for understanding climate change when the numbers show millions of people dying. That’s the difference here — well, that and the fact that the International Disaster Database is using actual deaths, not imaginary deaths in a hypothetical future dreamed up by modelers.

One can only wonder if this is why so many people are suffering from crisis fatigue. As if the world were somehow suffering from a shortage of genuine crises, doomsayers are creating imaginary ones that haven’t materialized yet but could in some not-too-distant future if we don’t give economic planners more control over the economy.

None of this is to say we shouldn’t be responsible stewards of the environment; we should. But we should also recognize the basic economic truth that all policies come with trade-offs, and those trade-offs have the potential to be far more damaging to humanity than even the darkest visions conjured by climate change prophets.