GWH is really wobbling now. This very cold winter–one expects Hanson to soon proclaim it the hottest year ever–has led to warming alarmists blaming global warming for the arctic blizzards and plunging temperatures.
I had been thinking the weather seemed more like the kind the country experienced when I was a kid long before global warming was a fevered glint in Al Gore’s eye. And now, a new study by non Kool Aid drinking scientists–but also not “deniers”–shows that we are not experiencing more severe weather extremes. From a column in the WSJ by Anne Jolis:
Some climate alarmists would have us believe that these storms are yet another baleful consequence of man-made CO2 emissions. In addition to the latest weather events, they also point to recent cyclones in Burma, last winter’s fatal chills in Nepal and Bangladesh, December’s blizzards in Britain, and every other drought, typhoon and unseasonable heat wave around the world. But is it true? To answer that question, you need to understand whether recent weather trends are extreme by historical standards. The Twentieth Century Reanalysis Project is the latest attempt to find out, using super-computers to generate a dataset of global atmospheric circulation from 1871 to the present.
As it happens, the project’s initial findings, published last month, show no evidence of an intensifying weather trend. “In the climate models, the extremes get more extreme as we move into a doubled CO2 world in 100 years,” atmospheric scientist Gilbert Compo, one of the researchers on the project, tells me from his office at the University of Colorado, Boulder. “So we were surprised that none of the three major indices of climate variability that we used show a trend of increased circulation going back to 1871.” In other words, researchers have yet to find evidence of more-extreme weather patterns over the period, contrary to what the models predict. “There’s no data-driven answer yet to the question of how human activity has affected extreme weather,” adds Roger Pielke Jr., another University of Colorado climate researcher.
The column draws a lesson with which I totally agree–one promoted by global warming believer Bjorn Lomborg–that the way to deal with whatever might be coming isn’t to make us poorer, which severe restrictions carbon dioxide emissions and dampening oil and gas development would do, but more prosperous:
There is at least one climate lesson that we can draw from the recent weather: Whatever happens, prosperity and preparedness help. North Texas’s ice storm wreaked havoc and left hundreds of football fans stranded, cold, and angry. But thanks to modern infrastructure, 21st century health care, and stockpiles of magnesium chloride and snow plows, the storm caused no reported deaths and Dallas managed to host the big game on Sunday. Compare that outcome to the 55 people who reportedly died of pneumonia, respiratory problems and other cold-related illnesses in Bangladesh and Nepal when temperatures dropped to just above freezing last winter…
Global-warming alarmists insist that economic activity is the problem, when the available evidence show it to be part of the solution. We may not be able to do anything about the weather, extreme or otherwise. But we can make sure we have the resources to deal with it when it comes.
Weather ebbs and flows. Climate changes. GWH”s loss of credibility–now there was an extreme change in the (political) climate–was entirely self inflicted by eye-popping hyperbole, extreme over reaching, and a failed strategy of fear mongering to seize control of the international economy and redistribute wealth.
Meanwhile, a World Bank study of the issue shows very little relative global financial costs associated with warming-caused “extreme weather events” by the year 2100:
Given empirical evidence aboutthe link between climate and damages, climate change is calculated to increase the damages from these five extreme events by between $11 and $16 billion a yearby 2100. There is little supporting evidence that climate affects deaths from these events (except for the possibility of local storm deaths increasing). Summing the damages in this report with tropical cyclone and severe storm damages from the literature suggests that climate change may increase the overall damage from extreme events by $84 billion or 0.015 percent of world GDP.
Nails in the coffin.
February 11th, 2011 | 12:04 pm
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February 11th, 2011 | 1:01 pm
I guess you don’t read the news very much. One of the big things that is going on are increases in insurance losses. See the many articles about this. One article in Reuters:
Storms are happening in places they never happened before, at intensities they have never reached before and at times of year when they didn’t used to happen.
Those bizarre weather patterns damage not just homes but also insurance companies’ financials. If seas rise and houses flood, insurers pay. If winds shift and buildings blow down, they also pay. If temperatures rise and crops fail, same thing.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/02/09/us-insurance-climate-idUSTRE7182XG20110209
There are many examples of unexpected things happening. We should be creating jobs in green manufacturing through tax breaks and subsidies, just like we do with the oil and gas industry now.
Burying our collective heads in the sand is not the solution.
February 11th, 2011 | 2:01 pm
Obviously you have randomness as a factor and a single season hardly merits classification as a trend. However, surely there are developments such as Siberian and Himalayan snow pack increase that appear to have a direct link to overall warming trends and reduction in icepack in the northern arctic regions. It is at least plausible and likely probable that outlier events are also related to the longer term warming trend.
February 11th, 2011 | 2:16 pm
pse12,
Have you taken account of the fact of increased population density overall, more people willing and able to build in potential disaster areas, wildly increased cost of infrastructure (no thanks to that darn Singularity). There might be other factors. For example, this also from your same story:
“One of the biggest problems for insurers is that they have to insure increasingly valuable properties in risky areas that, by and large, are not being built with disaster risk in mind. That in and of itself is driving their risk up dramatically.”
“What changed is the value of the properties to be insured and the volume of them. People around the world love beachfront houses and developers love selling them.”
February 11th, 2011 | 2:23 pm
Plus, 200 years ago most areas didn’t keep detailed weather records or where not even settled enough for anyone to notice. That’s why I laugh when someone says “100 year storm” in America, as if being here since the 1600s gives us enough knowledge to predict long-term weather patterns. It’s like judging the outcome of a football game based on watching one drive and playing Madden 2005 to predict the rest of it.
February 11th, 2011 | 3:04 pm
Media was the fuel for this CO2 insanity. So “NOW” is the time to have these irresponsible journalists and news editors charged with TREASON for knowingly feeding this public riot of needless CO2 panic and for knowingly leading our country to war against a false enemy of climate variation. And meanwhile, the UN had allowed carbon trading to trump 3rd world fresh water relief, starvation rescue and 3rd world education for just over 24 years of climate control instead of needed population control. Nice job.
Call your local authorities today and demand justice
February 11th, 2011 | 6:01 pm
The total warming rate in the troposphere, which begins at the earth’s surface up to the top of the active weather zone, is just 5% for CO2 and 95% for water vapor. Both are major GHGs. For most of the CO2, where active, its wavelength bands are at or near saturation. Water absorbs over much the same range as CO2 and then a lot more. Clouds, being water droplets, are not a GHG. They absorb about 20% of the longwave IR emitted by Earth & can briefly saturate the atmospheric radiation window (8-13 microns) through which some Earth radiation passes directly to space. This is the real greenhouse effect and has nothing to do with CO2! GHGs can’t obstruct this window. So, adding more GHGs that absorb in the nearly or already saturated bandwidths has little or no additional warming effect. The bottom line, which now appears evident, is that the doubling of CO2 will increase planetary warming by only about 1 degree C. This is why we see no linear relationship between atmospheric CO2 change and the global Mean temperature trends. Fixation on atmospheric CO2 is a big mistake when other anthropogenic effects may be at work.
February 11th, 2011 | 6:08 pm
Please note my previous comment is paraphrased from: The Real “Inconvenient Truth”, Some facts about greenhouse and global warming, August 2007. Read the entire article, then check out:
“NOAA Confirms Recent Global Temperature Change is Historically Small & Warming is Decelerating”, dated o1/2011. Look at the first chart. The rising CO2 levels had no impact on the global temperature changes over the last 130 years!
February 11th, 2011 | 6:10 pm
JustChris,
Don’t waste your time relating truths… we’ll have none of that here.
This place is for name calling and disinformation.
February 11th, 2011 | 11:31 pm
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February 12th, 2011 | 7:48 pm
It boggles the imagination and nearly defies comprehension, the lengths that some will go to to avoid seeing the truth in front of their eyes. The world is changing rapidly, drastically,and for the worse, by nearly every metric you could use. Blame it on nature, human produced greenhouse gases, over exploitation of the environment, or space aliens, etc. People who rely on dubious percentage points in spurious data are the worst, as they ARE MISSING THE PICTURE. Sad, really, but that’s most peoples defense against reality, I guess.
February 13th, 2011 | 12:34 am
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February 13th, 2011 | 9:27 am
Wes,
I couldn’t agree more. This coffin is nailed shut. We have decided politically that climate is not an issue and we’ll deal with it as it comes. No amount of sturm and drang from climate scientists will change that. Only events on the ground, years hence, will impact the majority opinion, and by that time we will have bequeathed our progeny their own hell on Earth. We’ve handed the keys to America to the plutocrats. Let’s hope they know how to drive (there’s no evidence they do).
February 13th, 2011 | 1:33 pm
Continued defense of Climate Change’s unstoppable warming is hurting the planet as it divides environmental efforts and stalls progressive social reforms. The UN had allowed carbon trading to trump 3rd world fresh water relief, starvation rescue and 3rd world education for just over 25 years of climate control instead of needed population control. Obama blew off climate change in his Feb. speech and none of his thousands of consensus scientists raised a fuss over it. They were paid. Real scientists would be marching in the streets. This IS after all the biggest emergency ever, unstoppable warming, not bad weather. Why are the scientists not leading this insanity, instead of the politicians promising to lower the seas with taxes? If climate change was true these scientists would be on every news cast and every front page and on every talk radio show. This was our Iraq War of climate WMD’s. System Change, not climate change.
February 13th, 2011 | 5:02 pm
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February 14th, 2011 | 1:31 am
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February 14th, 2011 | 8:13 am
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