There’s a catastrophic black hole in our climate data — and it’s a gift to its deniers George Monbiot
I He began by trying to discover whether the prevailing belief was true or not. In doing so, I stumbled upon something bigger: an index of world apathy. You already know that by burning fossil fuels, eating them up Meat and dairyBy failing to make even simple changes, the rich world is imposing an enormous burden of disaster, displacement and death on people whose responsibility for the climate crisis is minimal. What I’ve stumbled into now is the huge black hole of our ignorance of these influences.
What I wanted to find out was whether it was true that nine times more people died from cold than from heat. the The number is often used By people who want to delay climate action: If we do nothing, some say, fewer people will die. Of course, it ignores all the other impacts of climate breakdown: storms, floods, droughts, fires, crop failures, disease, and sea level rise. But is this claim at least true?
This number comes from a study using The broadest data sets available To try to produce a global vision. The results were, to say the least, surprising. For example, the study indicates that even in the hottest regions of the world, more people die from cold than from heat. In fact, sub-Saharan Africa appears to have the most water in the world higher mortality From the cold and the world minimum Heat death rate. Figures indicate that the number of people who die from cold is 58 times greater than from heat. While it is true that in hot places there are people Less adapted to coldCould it really be so?
The paper explains that its dataset “covers 750 sites in 43 countries or territories.” But the only African country included is South Africa. There is no data from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Gulf states (except Kuwait), Indonesia, or Melanesia. In other words, most of the world’s hottest countries are not represented. It is also most places where health care is weakest, whether for the population as a whole (as is the case in some African countries) or for the most vulnerable people (as is the case in the Gulf countries, where citizens may have good coverage, but Migrant workers hardly at all). This is in no way the authors’ fault – it is simply a matter of where the records are available.
The study had to model global trends from the places where the data are located, which tend to be richer, colder countries, where health systems are relatively strong. There is nothing that I see as wrong with the methodology: it is just that the records are incomplete. As one of the authors, Professor Antonio Gasparini, told me, their extrapolation “was moderate in some areas, but more extreme in others… In some cases the degree of extrapolation (especially geographical) was huge, and we cannot rule out that the model works less well in some areas.” They are currently trying to improve it. It is a topic that we, as the main actors in the chaos, have a moral obligation to understand It appears on the map Like a huge hole with a few jagged edges.
A research paper published in 2020 suggests that it is found in large parts of Africa There is no record Even in extreme heat, though, it definitely happens. Heat events mean large temperature anomalies, where a large number of people are expected to die. The important international disaster database EM-DAT records only two heat waves in sub-Saharan Africa between 1900 and 2019. They are believed to have caused the death of 71 people. The same database lists “83 heat waves in Europe between 1980 and 2019, resulting in the deaths of more than 140,000 people.”
Even the extreme heat wave in Africa in 1991-1992 was not reported in the EM-DAT database. Because people in Africa tend, the study notes, to have “higher levels of vulnerability and exposure” than people in Europe, is it really plausible that fewer people would die from heat on that continent than on any other?
Far from the improvement in data we might expect, there has been a rapid and disastrous improvement Decrease in the number of meteorological stations Measure conditions across Africa. There are now blocks hundreds of miles across Not a one stop shop It has been registered. As climate scientist Tova Dinko said Pointing: “Coverage tends to be worse in rural areas, where livelihoods may be more vulnerable to climate variability and climate change.”
Not to mention the weather radar Stations that monitor and forecast weather patterns and are essential for early warning. In the United States and Europe, where 1.1 billion people live, there are 565 weather stations, while in Africa, where 1.5 billion people live, there are 565 weather stations. There are 33According to the World Meteorological Association. Without weather warnings, more people would die.
As for deaths caused by heat, epidemiologist Professor Christie Eby said Pointing Even in the United States, the official estimate, which is about 1,200 per year, “is probably at least ten times lower.” The vast majority of them are recorded as heart attacks, kidney failure or other conditions. But epidemiological data show how deaths rise during heat waves. Heaven knows the extent of under-reporting in countries with sparse records.
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The same applies to other impacts of global warming. A study published in Nature last week revealed that Deaths caused by rainfall In Mumbai, “it is much larger than documented in official statistics.” Those most affected are slum residents, especially women and children. In other words, people who are not counted among them.
We can see the global lack of funding for data collection as an indicator of how little powerful governments care about human life. This reminds me of the statement of the US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld did During the 2003 Iraq War, this came to represent the bloody indifference on the part of the Bush administration: “We don’t do body counts.”
How can weak countries be compensated for?Loss and damage“Caused by climate breakdown if we have no idea how huge this loss and damage will be? Until now, rich countries have not been able to It pledged only $788.8 million To the United Nations Fund. This means 44 US cents for each of the 1.8 billion citizens of the Forum countries at risk from climate change: the sum of our “compensations” for the disruption, disasters and deaths we have caused.
The COP Thirty summit could be portrayed as a huge disregard for the rich world’s indifference: we don’t know and we don’t care, so why should we confront our people with the need for change, with all the political difficulties that entails? Turn your face away from the void, fearing the moral challenge it represents.