Tornadoes Are Not the Sign of a Climate-Change Apocalypse

O ver the weekend, deadly tornadoes devastated towns and communities in Kentucky and elsewhere. As of this writing, there have been 100 confirmed deaths, and more are likely to come. Thousands are without power and water. The images show a staggering tragedy.

What they don’t show is an especially unique tragedy. Whatever your position is on climate change, pretending that natural disasters can be stopped if only we adopted the Green New Deal policies is both risible and cynical. And yet, this didn’t stop President Joe Biden from exploiting the deaths to push his climate agenda. “This is going to be our new normal,” FEMA administrator Deanne Criswell added, in what has become the perfunctory politicization of every natural disaster. But, of course, “the new normal” means historically low deaths from natural disasters and extreme weather. Despite the Democrats’ cataclysmic rhetoric, Americans are safer than ever from extreme climate.

Natural disasters, for those born before 2000, aren’t a new phenomenon. Floods and tornadoes have always been treacherous, even when far fewer people were living in the middle of the country. You are not experiencing a climate hellscape. You, in fact, have less need to be worried about weather events than perhaps anyone in history. According to the U.S. Natural Hazard Statistics, 2020 was below the 30-year average for deaths from hurricanes, floods, heat, and cold. We don’t even have numbers on extreme temperature fatalities prior to 1985. If you want to understand what dangerous climate looks like, think of a world before HVAC systems.

Happenstance, of course, has a lot to do with fatalities as well. In 2011, 553 Americans were killed by tornadoes — the highest number since 1875 when we (sort of) began keeping track. But in 2018, tornadoes killed only ten Americans, the lowest number since we began measuring. The trend, however, is clear. Global deaths resulting from climate-related disasters — floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts, wildfires, and extreme temperatures — averaged nearly half a million every year in the 1920s. By the 2000s, we averaged fewer than 14,000 deaths worldwide every year from these same disasters. As nations continue to develop and become wealthier, those numbers will keep falling, as they have nearly every decade for the past century.

The drop has been more precipitous in the United States than elsewhere. In 1942, the year Biden was born, 384 Americans died in tornadoes, even though far fewer Americans lived in their paths. Last year, 76 Americans died in tornadoes. The year Biden first ran for office, 555 people died in floods. Last year, 57 Americans did.

In 2005, 1,016 Americans died in hurricanes — more than had perished in the entire previous decade. We were warned then that Hurricane Katrina was merely a prelude to endless storms and ecological disasters that were precipitated by our rapacious addiction to fossil fuels. The movie poster for 2006’s Academy Award–winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth featured a hurricane materializing from a smokestack. Anyway, the release of Al Gore’s movie was followed by nine years without a single major hurricane landing in the United States — or, six fewer hurricanes than we had in 1908, the year the Model T was introduced. When more powerful hurricanes finally hit again, climate-change activists went right back to warning of Armageddon. (Even alarmists, though, have struggled in linking tornadoes to global warming. You can tell from the headlines — “Scientists are working to figure out how climate change influences tornadoes” or “Climate change likely played a role in this weekend’s deadly tornadoes. The question is how” — that experts are working to fix that problem.)

And what about the damage caused by natural disasters? Bjorn Lomborg argues that weather-related damages from 1990 to 2020 declined from 0.26 percent of global GDP to 0.18 percent. But, even if that weren’t the case, the fact is that a lot more people are living in areas where extreme-weather events occur, and those people have a lot more expensive stuff.

Critics will point out that the declining death numbers are due to innovation, early warning systems, better infrastructure, and more mobility. The answer to this contention is, “You’re right.” That’s the point. Adaptation to climate change has been driving innovation since the first person put on a thatched roof. Human history has been a long fight to get out of the bad weather, and adaptation is a lot more affordable than overturning modernity.

Then again, if you believe the cost of shutting down the flow of affordable and reliable energy is worth it, that’s your prerogative. None of this diminishes the tragedy in Kentucky. We will never live without natural disasters. But right now, contra the rhetoric we’re hearing, the “new normal” means fewer than ever fatalities from those events.