2010 Was A Disaster, Or Was It?

Many recent news reports (e.g. this one) have focused on 2010 as a year with an unusual number of natural disasters, and of course, there have been many discussions whether this is related to climate change.

Using data from our news analytics API, we’ve looked at news regarding natural disasters, and if we compare the relative reporting on different natural disaster types between 2009 and 2010, the big difference is actually in the larger volcanic activity in 2010. There is a large increase in flooding as well, but looking at all “weather related disasters” that increase is balanced by less storm, wildfire, and typhoon news.
Looking at more detailed data, we do indeed find many natural disasters during the year, and below are the 25 with the most media coverage according to our analysis.

(NEWS PPM = 1,000,000*number of event instances for a canonic event for the year / total number of event instances for the year):

TYPE	LOCATION	NEWS PPM
flood	Pakistan	823
earthquake	Haiti	708
volcanic eruption	Iceland	510
earthquake	Chile	305
flood	China	288
wildfire	Russia	282
earthquake	China	256
volcanic eruption	Indonesia	232
ice storm*	Israel	230
drought	Russia	180
tsunami	Indonesia	119
landslide	China	97
typhoon	Philippines	83
flood	Nashville	77
flood	United States	77
earthquake	China	74
typhoon	China	74
volcanic eruption	Iceland	70
flood	Sri Lanka	65
flood	Croatia	62
earthquake	Indonesia	60
wildfire	Israel	59
storm	Melbourne	59
wildfire	Moscow	57
flood	Thailand	57

NOTE: the “ice storm — Israel” disaster looks surprising and is of course false – this is the news of an Israeli “settlement freeze” being reported!

For comparison, here is the top list for 2009. We immediately see that the top three natural disasters of 2010 have  much more relative media coverage than the top ones of 2009:

TYPE	LOCATION	NEWS PPM
earthquake	Indonesia	253
typhoon	Taiwan	238
earthquake	Italy	209
ice storm	Israel	189
earthquake	China	175
drought	China	120
flood	China	118
wildfire	California	112
monsoon	India	110
wildfire	Greece	101
earthquake	Sichuan	85
wildfire	Australia	78
cyclone	North Atlantic and Eastern North Pacific	72
typhoon	Philippines	66
storm	United States	65
hurricane	United States	58
typhoon	China	55
flood	Philippines	54
storm	Philippines	51
earthquake	Taiwan	46
flood	Manila	46
flood	Turkey	45
ice storm	United States	44
drought	India	43
ice storm*	West Bank	43

NOTE: the West Bank ice storm is again an incorrect interpretation of a settlement freeze

It is somewhat hard to confirm in our data that there were more natural disasters in 2010 than in 2009 – mostly because media tends to fill its “disaster quota” with smaller disasters if there are no big ones (see below).

A closer look at Haiti 2010

In terms of lost lives, the Haiti earthquake was by far the largest natural disaster of 2010. How was it reported? The following chart shows the number of events related to Haiti per publishing day for 2010:

We note that the peak of Natural Disaster events is, of course, right after it occurred; however, there is an increase in news towards the end of the year. Digging deeper, we can look at event time instead of publishing time:

We still see an increase at the end of 2010, but much less than for the publishing time. This indicates that the news at the end of the year is mostly referring back to the January event, probably in anticipation of the “anniversary” in January 2011.

Focusing on the month following the earthquake we find some interesting details:

The two to three weeks following the earthquake show a sharp increase in Person Travel events and Person Communication events, as everyone from politicians to Hollywood celebrities wanted to show their concern by traveling to and having meetings to talk about Haiti. After that, activity goes down significantly – the world media attention has moved on to something else!

Pakistan

Starting at the end of July, Pakistan suffered from heavy flooding (see Wikipedia for details). A similar chart for Pakistan does not reveal the same clear pattern of events following the disaster as Pakistan is simply too much in the news in general; however, the flooding is the significant event of the year for Pakistan. The nature of a drawn out event like rain caused flooding is also different from a single-point event like an earthquake as is clearly shown in the graph.

Media response to natural disasters

Looking back again at 2010, we’ve had a number of natural disasters that top the media flow, as illustrated by the peaks in the graph below that shows the number of Natural Disaster instances divided by the total number of event instances, per publishing day. However, since there are always small natural disasters occurring, and disasters are something media like to write about (!!!), there is also a fairly constant background noise¹ natural disaster news – typically 2% of the events we extract on any given day are related to natural disasters, with peaks going up to about 15% for extreme events.

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¹ Maybe this noise is related to the old Jerry Seinfeld joke about how “It’s amazing that the amount of news that happens in the world every day always just exactly fits the newspaper.”