Today is Disaster Risk Reduction Day #DRRDay

There is good news to report on this front, but continued progress requires continued effort
Under indicators of the @UN Sustainable Development Goals the world is making progress with respect to disasters - but there is no guarantee that it will continue, sustained effort is needed

tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.108…
Vulnerability has decreased globally:
"Results show a clear decreasing trend in both human & economic vulnerability, with global average mortality & economic loss rates that have dropped by 6.5 and nearly 5 times, respectively, from 1980–1989 to 2007–2016"
sciencedirect.com/science/articl…
Progress on disasters with respect to UN SDG indicators can be seen across all global income categories
thelancet.com/journals/lance…
What matters most for continued progress with respect to disasters?

Governance
Accountability
Energy access
Infrastructure
and more

See: tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.108…

/END

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More from @RogerPielkeJr

13 Oct
Really insightful new essay by Simon Robertson on issues raised by the IPCC dual roles in both assessing and producing climate research
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.100…
We also discuss this in depth (and also in the context of the IPCC IAMC) in this paper:
papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…
These issues were highlighted by @Oliver_Geden in 2015
nature.com/news/policy-cl…
Read 4 tweets
12 Oct
It will be interesting to watch the up-is-down reporting on the new UN report on disasters

The graph below is from data in the report (Figure 5, p. 10)

It shows that "climate-related" disasters have declined by ~15% over the past 20 years (2000-2019)
Back in 2007, in its annual report CRED/EM-DAT warned about using pre-2000 data to say anything about climate change, because of the massive increasing in reporting of disasters around the world.
Here is what CRED told the NYT in 2009:
dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/23/gor…
Read 5 tweets
10 Oct
🧵
There’s a lot of smart & nuanced discussion of the messiness of science in the real world in this essay by @mattwridley

But by the time he gets to the end, my views depart from his pretty severely ...

wsj.com/articles/what-… via @WSJ
Here is how @mattwridley concludes his essay

None of us are prepared to examine evidence ourselves & judge which experts are more reliable than others

Fortunately, there are formal & informal mechanisms which play this role

That’s the short cut
Such “short cuts” — which we can call science advisory mechanisms — generally (but importantly, not always) work well in contexts like climate & GMOs, but have for the most part failed miserably in the pandemic
Read 5 tweets
9 Oct
Short🧵

The reverberations of my 2014 column on disasters @FiveThirtyEight continue in 2020

Here Harvard's Dennis Thompson writes about it in Daedelus amacad.org/publication/pr…

I appreciate Prof Thompson's interest in my work, but he gets some things badly wrong, some thoughts
Prof Thompson certainly isn't the 1st academic to write about a colleague w/o reading their work or asking their views, hence

"He presumably thought..."
"His post was seen as..."
"Some critics question..."

How does this sort of uninformed speculation get published in a journal?
I hear this a lot:

"Witnessing professionals would do better to emphasize instead the long-term harms rather than getting involved in controversies about the causes of particular weather disasters."

IOW: "Your good science makes my political advocacy more difficult. Shut up."
Read 8 tweets
6 Oct
Year-to-date hurricane and major hurricane activity is well below average in the Northern Hemisphere (via @philklotzbach --> tropical.atmos.colostate.edu/Realtime/)
NH hurricanes since 1990
To date in 2020 (6 Oct) there have been 22, about 4 below average
NH major hurricanes since 1990
To date in 2020 (6 Oct) there have been 9 (about 4 below average)
Read 5 tweets
2 Oct
Important article by @SolomonMg and colleagues

Projecting Confidence: How the Probabilistic Horse Race Confuses and Demobilizes the Public | The Journal of Politics: Vol 82, No 4 journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.108…
I discussed the pathological potential of horse race election predictions a little ways back

amp.theguardian.com/science/politi…
Read 4 tweets

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