In the long run,
the facts are on the side of the optimists.
To paraphrase Martin Luther King Jr., the arc of history bends toward progress. But progress doesn't just happen. People work hard to discover ways forward.
The What Works Initiative
highlights positive outcomes on difficult issues – and how people achieved them.
Weather disasters used to be far more disastrous. A storm surge in Galveston in 1900 killed about 8,000. In 1931, a flood on the Yangtze in China killed almost 4 million.
Since then, the weather has grown more violent.
But the number of killed by these climate-related disasters so far in the 21st century is less than a quarter of the number killed in the first quarter of the 20th. And there are four times as many people in the world as a century ago. Factoring in the vastly greater population, the average death rate per total population was 50 times higher in the 1920s than in the 2020s.
So people are paradoxically far safer despite the weather.
How so? Dramatically better weather prediction, communication networks, and better engineering.
Source: Our World in Data