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.

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

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