a political scientist at the University of Colorado, Boulder, who studies disaster trends, said the Forum's report was "a methodological embarrassment" because there was no way to distinguish deaths or economic losses related to human-driven global warming amid the much larger losses resulting from the growth in populations and economic development in vulnerable (易受傷害的) regions.

The studies also ran up against many methodological challenges, the biggest of which centered on the old statistical saying, "Correlation does not equal causation."