The most striking feature of weather extremes in 2020 was not the extremes themselves, but the use of socio-economic studies of natural disasters to link extreme weather to global warming.
Not only has the annual number of global disasters over the last 20 years declined, but the number of people killed by weather extremes has also been falling steadily over the past century – though this is due as much to improvements in planning, engineering and early warning systems as it is to diminishing natural disasters. And once financial losses from climate related disasters, which are currently increasing, are corrected for population gain and the ever-rising value of property in harm’s way, there is very little evidence to support any connection between natural disasters and global warming.
