Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

Sources: Data are from different sources and may not be completely commensurable (see note 63 for details). For 1913, 1933, and 1980: Bureau of Labor Statistics, National Safety Council, and CDC National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, respectively, cited in Centers for Disease Control 1999. For 1970: Occupational Safety and Health Administration, “Timeline of OSHA’s 40 Year History,” https://www.osha.gov/osha40/timeline.html. For 1993–1994: Bureau of Labor Statistics, cited in Pegula & Janocha 2013. For 1995–2005: National Center for Health Statistics 2014, table 38. For 2006–2014: Bureau of Labor Statistics 2016a. The latter data were reported as deaths per full-time-equivalent workers and are multiplied by .95 for rough commensurability with the preceding years, based on the year 2007, when the Census of Fatal Occupation Injuries reported rates both per worker (3.8) and per FTE (4.0).

Who by earthquake. Could the efforts of mortals even mitigate what lawyers call “acts of God”—the droughts, floods, wildfires, storms, volcanoes, avalanches, landslides, sinkholes, heat waves, cold snaps, meteor strikes, and yes, earthquakes that are the quintessentially uncontrollable catastrophes? The answer, shown in figure 12-8, is yes.

After the ironic 1910s, when the world was ravaged by a world war and an influenza pandemic but relatively spared from natural disasters, the rate of death from disasters has rapidly declined from its peak. It’s not that with each passing decade the world has miraculously been blessed with fewer earthquakes, volcanoes, and meteors. It’s that a richer and more technologically advanced society can prevent natural hazards from becoming human catastrophes. When an earthquake strikes, fewer people are crushed by collapsing masonry or burned in conflagrations. When the rains stop, they can use water impounded in reservoirs. When the temperature soars or plummets, they stay in climate-controlled interiors. When a river floods its banks, their drinking water is safeguarded from human and industrial waste. The dams and levees that impound water for drinking and irrigation, when properly designed and built, make floods less likely in the first place. Early warning systems allow people to evacuate or take shelter before a cyclone makes landfall. Though geologists can’t yet predict earthquakes, they can often predict volcanic eruptions, and can prepare the people who live along the Rim of Fire and other fault systems to take lifesaving precautions. And of course a richer world can rescue and treat its injured and quickly rebuild.

Figure 12-8: Natural disaster deaths, 1900–2015

Source:Our World in Data, Roser 2016q, based on data from EM-DAT, The International Disaster Database, www.emdat.be. The graph plots the sum of the death rates for Drought, Earthquake, Extreme temperature, Flood, Impact, Landslide, Mass movement (dry), Storm, Volcanic activity, and Wildfire (excluding Epidemics). In many decades a single disaster type dominates the numbers: droughts in the 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, and 1960s; floods in the 1930s and 1950s; earthquakes in the 1970s, 2000s, and 2010s.

It’s the poorer countries today that are most vulnerable to natural hazards. A 2010 earthquake in Haiti killed more than 200,000 people, while a stronger one in Chile a few weeks later killed just 500. Haiti also loses ten times as many of its citizens to hurricanes as the richer Dominican Republic, the country with which it shares the island of Hispaniola. The good news is that as poorer countries get richer, they get safer (at least as long as economic development outpaces climate change). The annual death rate from natural disasters in low-income countries has come down from 0.7 per 100,000 in the 1970s to 0.2 today, which is lower than the rate for upper-middle-income countries in the 1970s. That’s still higher than the rate for high-income countries today (0.05, down from 0.09), but it shows that rich and poor countries alike can make progress in defending themselves against a vengeful deity.⁶⁴

And what about the very archetype of an act of God? The projectile that Zeus hurled down from Olympus? The standard idiom for an unpredictable date with death? The literal bolt from the blue? Figure 12-9 shows the history.

Yes, thanks to urbanization and to advances in weather prediction, safety education, medical treatment, and electrical systems, there has been a thirty-seven-fold decline since the turn of the 20th century in the chance that an American will be killed by a bolt of lightning.

Figure 12-9: Lightning strike deaths, US, 1900–2015

Source:Our World in Data, Roser 2016q, based on data from National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, http://www.lightningsafety.noaa.gov/victims.shtml, and López & Holle 1998.