From Investors Business Daily
Climate Myths: We keep reading about how the extreme weather of 2017 is the “new normal” thanks to global warming — even if the weather in question is frigid air. But the data don’t show any trend in extreme weather events in the U.S. for decades. Science, anyone?
Naturally, climate change advocates point to this as further proof that the increase in CO2 levels is already causing calamities around the world. “As human-induced climate change continues to progress, extreme weather is becoming more frequent and dangerous,” is how the Environmental Defense Fund put it.
Munich RE’s own Corporate Climate Center head claims that “2017 was not an outlier” and that “we must have on our radar the trend of new magnitudes.”
But what evidence is there that extreme weather “is becoming more frequent and dangerous.” In the U.S., there isn’t any.
If you don’t believe that, then look at the series of charts below, which are taken from government sites, that depict trends in hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts and wildfires — all of which should be, according to environmentalists, on the uptrend.
Click here for more, including a series of charts
Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. notes on his blog “The Climate Fix”
The figure above shows the annual costs of weather disasters (data from Munich Re) as a proportion of global GDP (data from the UN), from 1990 to 2017.
Takeaways:
- 2017 ranks 2nd to 2005;
- The dataset is dominated by US hurricanes (accounting for about 70% of losses);
- The trend from 1990 to 2017 is downward;
- Mean and median are both 0.24%;
- 6 of past 10 years have been below average;
The most important caveat: don’t use disasters to argue about trends in climate. Use climate data. Duh. (Pielke 2015 below has an accessible summary of IPCC conclusions on trends in weather extremes. See also IPCC SREX and AR5 .) Trends in the incidence of extreme weather help to explain this graph as the world has experienced a long stretch of good fortune.
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Over at notrickszone, they’ve compiled 7 recent papers that suggest warming leads to LESS EXTREME weather:
http://notrickszone.com/2017/12/26/media-silence-flurry-of-recent-papers-show-warming-likely-will-lead-to-less-storm-activity/#sthash.mvQgpJFJ.dpbs
That graph and trend are an uncanny match for one produced by the Bureau of Meteorology in Australia for cyclone frequency and intensity. Trending down over time. They stopped updating it when the trend was clearly going off narrative.
When people build on the shore, or below the water level in places that get hurricanes you’ll get more losses. Comlacency causes this.. let’s not fall into the trap of measuring weather by losses when this could have been avoided
I agree MDS. And surprisingly, Scientific American does too. Sure, they throw in the obligatory link to climate change, but they place the bulk of the blame on coastal population growth, overdevelopment, and poor planning.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/hurricane-irma-floridas-overdevelopment-has-created-a-ticking-time-bomb/
I went to
https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/extremes/cei/graph/us/cei-tc/01-12
for their “climate extreme index” with tropical cyclone indicator, and ran a correlation of extreme index percent on year, using “R”
I got
v -0.01394
Indicating a slight DOWNWARD trend in extreme weather events, but the “p” value was 0.226, indicating that such a deviation from zero could happen 22.6% of the time by chance alone- insignificant.
What point did you start from? The 9-point binomial filter on the chart shows a clear increase since the 1970s. At +0.4%/dec the linear trend is upwards across the whole series. Since 1970 the trend is +3.7%/dec.
From 1910, the start of the data set.
Then the linear trend is an increasing one, at 0.4%/dec.
Nonsense: I picked the “climate extreme index” – “WITH tropical cyclone indicator” and got a negligible decrease.
Actually, it stands to reason that there should be a decrease with a rise in average temperatures after the 1800s- The second law states that the energy for heat engines comes from temperature DIFFERENCES, not just from high temperatures. In the case of tropical cyclones it’s the water being warmer than the air that supplies the energy.
But the air won’t be getting as cold as quickly in the fall, so the energy for tropical cyclones should be REDUCED . This is why tornadoes tend to be associated with cold-fronts.
McIntired
There’s two big, HUGE, EXTREMMMMMMEEEEEEE
problems with extreme weather data:
– A lot of extreme weather would be completely invisible,
and therefore not counted, before the age of:
satellites,
the internet
cell phone cameras,
the leftist desire to report unusual weather as “extreme”
which they somehow link to global warming, and
far more people living on the Earth now to witness extreme weather.
And of course random variations from decade to decade
could be assumed to be meaningful trends.
Another point:
There has been far more warming around the North Pole
than around the South Pole,
So the temperature differential
between the North Pole and the tropics
has declined a lot more than the temperature differential
between the South Pole and the tropics,
In theory, that should cause a DECLINING trend
of extreme weather in the Northern Hemisphere,
that would NOT seen in the Southern Hemisphere.
Unfortunately, with all the oceans, I assume
much Southern Hemisphere extreme weather
was completely invisible and not counted before the
satellite age … so maybe that’s a dead end for any
investigation?
http://www.elOnionBloggle.Blogspot.com
As I said, I was just going by NOAA data, listed from 1910 on. As I said, the “WITH” tropical cyclone indicator ( I figured WITHOUT to be a cherry pick) showed a negligible DOWNWARD trend- i.e. weather events are NOT more extreme, as alleged by the CAGW kooks.