From the wildfires that torched Los Angeles in January to the record-setting heat waves that cooked much of Europe in June, the first half of 2025 has been marked by what now seems like a new normal of ever more frequent extreme weather. It’s easy to feel that we live in a constant stream of weather disasters, with one ending only so another can begin, thanks largely to the amplifying effects of climate change.
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Yet behind the catastrophic headlines is a much more positive story. For all of the floods and the fires and the storms and the cyclones, it turns out that globally, fewer people died from the direct effects of extreme weather globally through the first half of 2025 than any six-month period since reliable records began being kept decades ago.
About 2,200 people worldwide died in storms, floods, heat waves and other “weather‐climate” disasters in the first six months of the year, according to the risk consultancy company Aon’s midyear catastrophe report. They tallied 7,700 natural-hazard deaths overall, but if you take out the roughly 5,500 people who died in a single non-weather geological event — a major earthquake in Myanmar in March — you’re left with the smallest January-to-June weather death toll since we began keeping records. (Hat tip to Roger Pielke Jr., whose Substack post was where I first saw these figures.)
More than 2,000 deaths is still too many, and it doesn’t count more recent deadly disasters, like the terrible July floods in Texas’s Hill Country that killed at least 135 people. But it’s still remarkably low: The world has averaged 37,250 deaths in the first half of the year so far in the 21st century, and in previous centuries, far larger numbers of people often died because of extreme weather. Somehow, even as climate change has intensified many natural disasters and more people are living in harm’s way, the actual human toll from these catastrophes has been falling.
All of which raises two questions: How have we managed this? And will this trend continue even in an ever-warmer world?
The past was deadly
I’ve been writing this newsletter for a few months now, and if I were to boil down its message into one phrase, it’d be this: Wow, the past was much worse than you think.
That’s certainly the case for deadly natural disasters and extreme weather. As you can see from the chart above, the first half of the 20th century regularly had years when the death rate from natural disasters was as high as 50 deaths per 100,000 people, and sometimes far higher. (In 2024, it was just 0.2 deaths per 100,000 people.) But annualized death rates hide just how bloody some of these events were.
In 1931, massive flooding in China’s Yangtze and Yellow River killed perhaps 4 million people due to drowning,