As Alex Epstein likes to say, fossil fuels didn’t make a safe climate dangerous, they made a dangerous climate safe. Nowhere is that more apparent than in the data on climate-related deaths per million persons over the last 100 years, which shows that in direct contradiction to the endless hype about vast increases in lethally dangerous climate-driven storms, drought, crop failure, fires, floods, heatwaves and so on, the death rate fell by 98%. There aren’t many hazards and problems in this world that have declined by 98% in 100 years, but the risk of dying from a climate-related disaster is one of them. Here’s the data, in a chart Epstein created using numbers from OurWorldinData:

The essay at Epstein’s site discusses the ways our media, being what they are, have spent the last few years trying either to deny the trend or to insist that fossil fuels don’t deserve the credit. But they do.

Better weather forecasting also helped, a bit. But our ability to build more secure buildings, heat and cool them efficiently, evacuate in the face of looming danger in reliable vehicles along superb highways, and provide emergency aid during disasters have played key roles. Even if using fossil fuels increased the incidence of some forms of extreme weather (a debatable claim) that slight increase in risk was obviously overwhelmed by the reduction in risk made possible by abundant and cheap energy, an outcome we can only describe as very cheerful.