Are "Climate-Related Deaths" Decreasing?
A popular contrarian trope promoted by Bjorn Lomborg and his followers is that " climate-related deaths " have plummeted since 1920. Recently, he's claimed that there has been a 97.5% reduction in climate-related deaths since 1920. This is an extremely misleading graph, and it's not too difficult to uncover why. Lomborg got his data for "climate-related" deaths from the Our World in Data website, which lists deaths from "natural disasters" (OWD does not specify which of these deaths from natural disasters are "climate-related." I went to the site to see if I can reproduce Lomborg's graph. He only lists " floods, droughts, storms, and wildfires " but OWD includes other causes of death, including extreme weather and temperature. So below I show all on the OWD site except for earthquakes and volcanic activity . I suspect this is what Lomborg did. It should be easy to see what Lomborg has done: He relabeled OWD's data for ...