James Fletcher
speaker
208 appearances
7 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2014
last heard Sep 2014
James Fletcher’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And these experts found a very good candidate.
Where?
The United States of America, a hundred years ago.
It was a rural society with very few cars and naturally no access to modern healthcare, but which nevertheless kept statistics on lightning strikes.
Now, the death rate from lightning back then was about six deaths per million people every year.
The authors then applied that to the four billion people that they estimated were living in areas of the world that are susceptible to lightning strikes.
Lightning's a very tropical thing, after all.
And that's how they got 24,000 deaths.
But the authors are very open about the fact that that's a rough calculation.
So are there any more recent or better estimates?
Well, one of the authors of the earlier estimate, Ron Holler, has been involved with a more recent attempt to come up with a better number, extrapolating from some of the new, improved statistics from certain developing countries most affected by lightning.
This new method produces a new estimate.
Global lightning fatalities are, on this method, around 6,000.
That's a quarter of the size.
Which number's better?
Well, they're both educated guesses, and I asked Ron Holler which he'd go for.
Other people I contacted favoured the lower 6,000 figure, so I guess that's just a sign of how little we really know about this.
Something like 24,000 people a year worldwide get killed by lightning.
24,000 a year?
It's a major hazard, yes.
Showing 141–160 of 208 · page 8 of 11
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