Fewer climate victims thanks to coal, oil and gas

The original article can be read as “Schlumpfs graphic 124” in the online Nebelspalter of 16 September 2024.

A week ago, I showed how much the improvements in our living conditions since 1850 were and still are dependent on the growing use of fossil fuels (see here). Of course, such a far-reaching transformation of the energy system inevitably brings with it negative side effects, which I will now discuss. Most of these side effects are attributed to the rapidly increasing concentration of CO₂ in the atmosphere. Many fear that this will lead to escalating warming and also to more and more severe weather disasters that we will no longer be able to control.

What is important:

– The world’s CO₂ emissions have risen steadily in step with energy consumption since 1850 – and at a much faster rate since 1950.
– The number of deaths caused by natural disasters has fallen by over 95 percent in the last hundred years.
– The amount of economic damage from climate disasters, measured in terms of gross domestic product, shows no trend for the last 30 years.
– These successes were only possible thanks to the use of fossil fuels. Oil, gas and coal are the only way to mitigate the negative consequences of greenhouse gases.

First, let’s look at the global development of annual CO₂ emissions from the use of fossil fuels from 1850 to 2022 – i.e. in the period since the Industrial Revolution, which has been characterized by a massive increase in the consumption of coal, oil and gas (the graph is from “Our World in Data”, see here):

The emissions are given in billions of tons of CO₂ per year. Not surprisingly, the global annual totals of these emissions move practically in step with total energy consumption, which I showed in chart 1 of my last article (see here): From 0.36 billion tons in 1850, CO₂ emissions rise moderately to six billion tons by 1950, then increase at a faster pace to 37 billion tons by 2022 – so we are emitting a good hundred times more CO₂ annually today than in 1850.

Asia has been emitting more and more carbon dioxide since 2000

The graph also shows the shares of the individual regions of the world. Until 1950, CO₂ was emitted almost exclusively in the industrialized countries of Europe and the USA. After that, Asian countries also played an increasing role in the global emissions mix – with a particularly dramatic increase in China in the 2000s. In contrast, Europeans in particular succeeded in reducing their emissions from 1990 onwards.

China’s emissions are greater than those of Europe and the USA combined

Today, the USA and Europe are still responsible for a good 27% of global CO₂ emissions, while Asia is the main source with a high 59% (China 31%). A look at emissions from international air traffic (at the top) is also revealing: Only 1.1 percent of CO₂  released into the atmosphere worldwide comes from jets – so even a ban on all aviation would do nothing to help the climate.

So what about the negative effects of this strong CO₂ growth for us humans? It is repeatedly claimed that the number of climate-related natural disasters has already risen sharply for this reason. In 2022, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres made the following statement: “Floods, droughts, heatwaves, extreme storms and forest fires are getting worse and breaking records more frequently (…) The number of weather-, climate- or water-related disasters has increased fivefold in the last 50 years.”

The number of severe weather disasters has not increased since 2000

In “Schlumpf’s Graph 107” I have unmasked this statement as a blatant falsehood (see here): In reality, there has been no trend in the number of climate-related storms since 2000. Even more important than the probability of such natural disasters occurring, however, is the impact on people’s well-being, i.e. the number of victims and the economic damage they cause.

Over 90 percent reduction in casualties from storms

The hardest currency with which to measure such consequential damage from the rise in CO₂ is the number of people who lose their lives due to storms. The next graph shows the number of deaths due to natural disasters since 1920 in ten-year increments (this graph also comes from “Our World in Data”, see here):

Because the number of victims per year fluctuates greatly, they have been smoothed here to a ten-year average: The figure for 1920 therefore shows the average for the years 1920 to 1929 et cetera.  The global downward trend shown in the graph is astonishing and impressive: from 524,000 deaths in the 1920s, the number of victims fell to 38,000 in the 2020s (the decade has not yet ended, of course) – the risk of dying as a result of a natural disaster has therefore fallen by an astonishing 93% in the last 100 years!

The figures in this graph also include victims of earthquakes (light brown), which are not affected by CO₂ emissions. If these deaths are excluded, the total number of climate-relevant victims will fall by at least half per decade after the year 2000. We also know that in the early 20th century, only the really big events left enough traces in historical documents  to appear in these statistics; smaller disasters were not taken into account. If all of this is included in the calculation, the risk of dying due to climate-related natural disasters falls by much more than 93 percent in the hundred years under consideration.

Hardly any more deaths from natural disasters thanks to fossil fuels

The graph also shows that by far the most people died due to droughts (blue) and floods (purple) up to 1970. With improved construction measures and more efficient warning systems, irrigation and drainage machines, more efficient means of transportation and more sophisticated medical supplies (the list is incomplete), the effects of these two plagues could be combated so well from the 1980– s onwards that they have hardly claimed any more victims since then.

However, in all the measures listed, be it the construction of dams, the operation of water pumps for irrigation, the installation of early warning systems or the transportation of relief supplies to poor countries in emergency situations – fossil fuels always play such a central role in these actions that many of these improvements would not have been possible without coal, oil or gas.

Storm damage shows no trend compared to GDP

Finally, let’s take a look at the material damage caused by extreme weather events between 1990 and 2017. To take into account the growing global wealth during this period, the figures are given as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP) (the graphic is again from “Our World in Data”, see here):

Measured against our growing prosperity, the costs caused by climate-related disasters fluctuate between 0.1 and 0.4 percent of GDP: this is anything but an existential threat.

Conclusion: Even if individual natural disasters have become more frequent , there is no trend in their overall number. However, despite a rapidly growing population, the number of deaths caused by these weather disasters has fallen massively. This “miracle” can only be explained by the enormous use of reliable, inexpensive, versatile energy that can be used everywhere – i.e. fossil fuels: Thanks to coal, oil and gas, over the last hundred years we have not only been able to neutralize old and new threats to a constantly changing climate, but in some cases even eliminate them.