Now this is completely ridiculous, from the
Irish Times (via
Bishop Hill):
As climate issues intensify the media, incredibly, throws in the towel
JOHN GIBBONS
OPINION: GLOBALLY, 2010 was a year of weather-related disasters on an almost unprecedented scale. Last year was worse, with a record $380 billion in economic losses attributed to “natural” disasters, many climate-related, according to insurance giant Munich Re.
Few experts expect to see any break in this upward trend this year, or any time soon. Instead, as record emissions of greenhouse gases continue unabated, the climate system is now behaving precisely as scientists have been projecting for decades. The rapid build-up of energy in the system is the “engine” that is fuelling extremes, from storms and floods to severe droughts.
Actually the facts are (as
Scientific American explains) that 2/3rds of the amount was not due to climate change, but to the Japanese tsunami and the New Zealand earthquake.
Natural disasters around the world last year caused a record $380 billion in economic losses. That's more than twice the tally for 2010, and about $115 billion more than in the previous record year of 2005, according to a report from Munich Re, a reinsurance group in Germany. But other work emphasizes that it is too soon to blame the economic devastation on climate change.
Almost two-thirds of 2011's exceptionally high costs are attributable to two disasters unrelated to climate and weather: the magnitude-9.0 earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan in March, and February's comparatively small but unusually destructive magnitude-6.3 quake in New Zealand.
It's probably good to be on the watch for this sort of thing.
A link to an article winding up with a quote from political scientist RP Jr.? Yes, we do need to be on the watch for that sort of thing.
ReplyDeleteYou should know better, David. Try this instead, from, you know, someone who actually knows something about the climate system.
Contrary to what "Consensus Science" tells us, a warming climate reduces the incidence of extreme weather.
ReplyDeleteAs temperatures rise the poles warm about three times faster than equatorial regions. This reduces the temperature gradient versus latitude and therefore the severity of storms.
People who suggest that weather is getting more extreme as the world warms are ignorant of history and physics.
While a warmer world is less stormy, it is also a wetter world. A wetter world has more abundant plant life and hence more food. What's not to like about that?
Steve Bloom,
ReplyDeleteJames Hansen's crackpot theories got the CAGW bandwagon rolling but Mother Nature refuses to cooperate.
That paper you cite talks about the "Holocene" but fails to mention that most of it was much hotter than today. Take a look at the "Climate Optimum" known as the Minoan Warm Period.
To bolster the fiction that temperatures are rising to "Catastrophic" levels Hansen is becoming increasingly desperate. Now he is trying to air brush history by "adjusting" high latitude temperature records from the 1930s and 1940s. Thanks to the Internet and its Wayback Machine you can't get away with that:
http://www.real-science.com/dr-hansimian-referee-tomorrows-afc-championship
Spam bots are a little slow to swarm...David, do you have software to repel them?
ReplyDeleteBest,
D