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Roger Pielke Jr. Profile picture
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13 Oct, 5 tweets, 3 min read
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

Roger Pielke Jr. Profile picture
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
Roger Pielke Jr. Profile picture
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
Roger Pielke Jr. Profile picture
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
Roger Pielke Jr. Profile picture
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
Roger Pielke Jr. Profile picture
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
Roger Pielke Jr. Profile picture
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…
Ungated link here:
Read 4 tweets

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