It's not news, its's opinion, but at least get the facts correct

The headline on Drudge links to a piece from My Way news that discusses how casualties from natural disasters in 2010 were the highest for at least a generation. And, in usual media fashion, we are also told that the fault for all these disasters and casualties is due to the actions of man. As the article puts it: "And we have ourselves to blame most of the time, scientists and disaster experts say."

The article is just plain wrong. First of all 220,000 out of the quarter of a million people who died in natural disasters this year were killed by the earthquake in Haiti. The authors blame human action for these deaths since the fatalities lived in earthquake prone areas. In other words, since humans did not abandon Haiti as a place of habitation, it is the fault of humanity that the fatalities happened. Under that reasoning, all fatalities are the fault of humanity since we have not previously committed mass suicide so that there would be no one left to be injured or killed in a disaster.

The remaining 30,000 who were killed this year are primarily blamed upon global warming by the authors. Of course, they provide no evidence that any of the storms, floods, earthquakes, snowstorms or the like were actually caused by human action. Instead they use the old "experts say" as a way to promote the idea that global warming has caused this. Don't get me wrong -- I am not saying that global warming did not cause this stuff, but I would like to see some actual proof one way or the other before deciding. Hysteria will not suffice. Nor will belief in environmentalist dogma unless it is backed up by actual facts.

Beyond the issue of cause, the reporters got their facts mangled as well. In 2004, there was a tsunami at christmas time that according to the US Geological Survey killed at least 275,950. That one day alone exceeded the total killed in 2010, but it happened only six years ago. As far as I know, no one blames the undersea earthquake that cased the tsunami on global warming.

So the authors got the number wrong, the causes wrong and the conclusion wrong. Other than that, they did a great job.