End of the world
Out of context: Reply #30
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Not only nature, statistics, too, are tricky
In the early nineties, United Nations experts warned: "The frequency and magnitude of natural disasters are increasing dramatically." A wave of media reports carried this message all around the globe. Now, a decade later, most people are thoroughly convinced that "natural disasters are on the rise" (Die Welt) and are "becoming ever more ominous" (Süddeutsche Zeitung). But is that really the case?
What certainly is true is that insurance claims are rising rapidly. But there can be many reasons for this. All over the world, people are becoming more affluent, although, of course, affluence is always relative. More and more people are insuring their belongings. And more people are living in high-risk zones. This is especially true of poor countries with rapidly growing populations, such as the coastal regions of Bangladesh. In other parts of the world, poverty is not a major factor in the popularity of dangerous areas as a place to live. For example, more and more Americans are moving to California (earthquakes, bush fires) or Florida (hurricanes).
The population density on the coasts of the United States has doubled over the last 20 years. The number of cities in the world with more than a million inhabitants has increased fourfold in the last thirty years. 1999 became the first year in which more people lived in cities than in the countryside. All of this would suffice to explain the rise in insurance claims, even if the number of storms, earthquakes, floods and volcanic eruptions were to remain the same.
There is another factor that causes uncertainty: Information from the past is often unreliable. It is usually based on newspaper reports. But the media coverage depends on the news-worthy occurrences of the day. A landslide that buries a village in South America only finds its way into European public attention if there was not much going on in Berlin, London, Paris, Moscow and Washington. 100 years ago, this egocentricity of the industrialised nations was even more pronounced. Newspaper readers back then were hardly interested at all in the death of a few hundred natives in some remote colony. The best illustration of this fluctuating interest is the disaster curve of the last 100 years, which exhibits a dramatic dip between 1936 and 1945. This is hardly because Mother Nature was behaving particularly benevolently at the time, but rather because the Second World War was overshadowing all the other disasters that were happening.
Finally, yet another source of uncertainty: it is very seldom for a final balance to be drawn up of the damage suffered. Often, for understandable reasons, figures are tossed around very early on that are then snapped up by reporters, regurgitated over and over again and never checked as to their validity. For example, the true cost of the Northridge earthquake that shook the region around Los Angeles in 1994 has not been positively established to this day. So it is no wonder that the catastrophe damage estimates published by the major reinsurance companies seldom agree. Even official government figures can not always be trusted. In dictatorships, for example, it is quite normal to play down natural disasters so that nobody gets the idea of questioning the "perfect" system's ability to cope. Conversely, it is in the interests of poverty-stricken developing countries to exaggerate reports of catastrophes to attract as much foreign aid as possible.
As a result, disaster statistics have to be taken with a grain of salt. Any attempt to extrapolate an increase or decrease in the occurrence and intensity of natural disasters is in for a surprise. The Austrian economists Josef Nussbaumer and Helmut Winkler investigated 1,422 natural disasters that each cost more than 100 human lives between 1986 and 1995. They could not identify a clear trend.
The bad news first: the number of minor disasters rose considerably. But - and this is the good news - the frequency of very large disasters (more than 10,000 deaths) declined in the 20th century. Major catastrophes of this kind (mostly droughts) had a huge impact on the mortality statistics. 98 percent of all deaths were attributable to just 140 major disasters. The reduction in the number of such catastrophes leads to the next piece of good news: natural disasters were killing less people at the end of the century than at its beginning. In affluent countries the number of deaths sank dramatically, and even in the developing countries the number of disaster fatalities fell slightly - despite the constantly expanding population.
This gives rise to all kinds of questions: is the number of disasters increasing, or is it just the number of media reports about them? Are natural disasters becoming less catastrophic (because there are less deaths), or are people just protecting themselves better? At least one conclusion would appear to be plausible: the poor suffer more than the rich.
Nussbaumer and Winkler are cautious about making any interpretations and emphasise that "both the availability and the reliability of the data are subject to a geographical and temporal shift". Their answer to the question of whether the forces of nature are on the increase: "The current status of research does not permit a clear answer to be given."