Where Is The “Climate Emergency”?

Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach

[Updated on a totally irregular basis as new information becomes available. Last update Mar 26, 2023]

Despite my asking over and over in a host of forums, including in my previous post, to date, nobody has been able to tell me just what this supposed “CLIMATE EMERGENCY!!” actually is and where I might find evidence that it exists. Here are some facts for the folks that think that the climate is a real danger to humanity.

Let me begin with the fact that the IPCC itself doesn’t think that there is a “climate crisis” or a “climate emergency”. In the IPCC AR6 WG1, the single mention of a “climate emergency” is a far-too-gentle chiding of the media for using the term, viz:

Some media outlets have recently adopted and promoted terms and phrases stronger than the more neutral ‘climate change’ and ‘global warming’, including ‘climate crisis’, ‘global heating’, and ‘climate emergency’.

SOURCE

And it’s no surprise that the IPCC doesn’t think there’s an emergency. To start with, deaths from climate-related phenomena are at an all-time low. If you think deaths from climate-related catastrophes are an emergency, please point in the graph below to the start of the “emergency”.

And it’s not just deaths. Global total infrastructure damages have been decreasing as well …

… as well as US damages from floods.

Someone said they didn’t believe UN data, so here’s a separate analysis of flood damage costs.

Storminess has not gone up, and there’s been no increase in hurricane strength or frequency … no “emergency” there. First, the strength.

And here is the global hurricane frequency, both for all hurricanes and for the strongest hurricanes.

The 12 months from April 2021 to May 2022 have seen close to the fewest major hurricanes in more than 40 years.

And there is much longer evidence to back that up. Here are the records of all hurricanes (left) and major hurricanes (right) that came ashore in the US in the last 150 years … NO increase. SOURCE: Nature magazine.

And here are the numbers of Pacific typhoons (hurricanes) from the Japanese Meteorological Agency.

Here are landfalling typhoons (hurricanes) in China. Like the majority of the world areas, we’re seeing fewer landfalls in China.

Here are all the records of landfalling hurricanes worldwide. This shows Global, North Atlantic (NATL), Western Pacific (WPAC), Eastern Pacific (EPAC), Northern Indian Ocean (NIO), and Southern Hemisphere (SH) landfalls for both major and all hurricanes.

The source study says (emphasis mine):

The collective global frequency of all global hurricane landfalls and the minor and major subsets shows considerable interannual variability but no significant linear trend (Fig. 2). Furthermore, when considering each basin individually during the entire time periods analyzed, it is not possible to ascertain a positive or negative trend in minor, major, or overall hurricane landfall frequency in all basins except the SH. In the SH a significant positive trend in major hurricane landfalls was detected; yet, the sample size is still small (Table 2). This result is not unexpected considering the known multidecadal signals in TC activity, which cannot be adequately resolved by our comparatively short historical record.

And here are a century and a half of records of the number of landfalling hurricanes in Florida.

Finally, here are the declining numbers of both strong and average cyclones in Australian waters, from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BOM).

Moving on to droughts, even the IPCC says there’s only one chance in five (“low confidence”) that global droughts are increasing (see the end notes). No flood or drought emergency. Nor have the “wet areas been getting wetter and the dry areas getting drier”. Here’s evidence from rainfall data.

As has happened throughout the existence of the earth some areas have been getting wetter and some drier, but the pattern expected from CO2 warming has not appeared. Here’s more evidence of the same thing, this time from the Palmer Drought Severity Index.

As with the rain, some areas are getting more droughts and some getting fewer droughts … but without any discernible pattern.

Droughts in the US have been decreasing, not increasing.

There are a lot of claims that the current drought in the US west is a result of “global warming” … but that point of view is shortsighted with regard to the history of the west.

And here is the latest study from Nature Magazine showing, guess what? Globally, droughts are decreasing, not increasing.

Nor are the extremes in the amount of moisture (droughts, floods) increasing in the US.

Global weather disaster losses as a percentage of assets at risk (global GDP) are decreasing, not increasing.

Alarmists keep posting scary-looking graphs of the loss of polar ice, like this one of Antarctica.

Or this one, from Greenland.

Those look totally frightening and emergency-like … until you realize that they ignore the reality of just how much ice there is in those locations. Here are the corresponding changes in total ice mass for the two locations.

In fact, a recent study in Nature Magazine says “The Antarctic continent has not warmed in the last seven decades, despite a monotonic increase in the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases.”

Despite all the hype and all the alarmism about how a melting Antarctica was going to raise sea levels by 20 feet (6 metres) and flood the world, Antarctica. Has. Not. Warmed. In. The. Last. Seven. Decades.

What about the widely-hyped reduction in Arctic sea ice? Turns out that it’s been matched by a widely-unhyped increase in Antarctic sea ice, so the total global sea ice area is currently right at the long-term average of 18 million square kilometers. No change in the 43 years of records, we’re back where we started. See here for more details.

Let’s move on to snow. Remember all the hysteria about how “our children just won’t know what snow is”? Turns out the rumors of the death of snow are greatly exaggerated. Here’s the 2021-2022 snow record to date …

Tide gauges show no increase in the rate of sea-level rise, merely the up-and-down that’s been going on for a century and more …

… and the claimed acceleration in satellite-measured sea level is merely an artifact of changing satellites.

Polar bears, once considered to be the “canary in the coal mine” for the “climate emergency”, are doing very well, thanks. More here: https://fee.org/articles/the-myth-that-the-polar-bear-population-is-declining/

Yields of all major food crops continue to rise, and humans are better fed, clothed, and housed against the vagaries of weather than at any time in the past.

And it’s not just yields that are going up. Despite the gradual warming since 1965, humans are better fed than ever. And this is a very valuable measure. Measures of income and wealth can get distorted because one person can make fifty times the income as another, or own fifty houses to the other’s one house.

But nobody can eat 50 breakfasts, so average food consumption measures the nutrition of the whole population, rich and poor alike. Here is the consumption of protein, calories, and fat for all the regions of the world.

Land temperatures have already risen more than the dreaded 2°C, with no cataclysmic consequences … there has been no historical “climate emergency” despite temperature increases.

Paleo data shows that over the Holocene temperatures have varied widely with little change in CO2, and the current warming started in 1700, long before the modern CO2 increase.

None of the endless serial doomcasts from the climate alarmists have come true …

There has been no global increase in the number of wildfires … here’s the NASA satellite data.

Here’s Australia …

And here’s the data from Canada …

And some more real-world global wildfire data …

And here’s a quote from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC):

A recent analysis using the Global Fire Emissions Database v.4 (GFED4s) that includes small fires concluded that the net reduction in land area burnt globally during 1998–2015 was –24.3 ± 8.8% (–1.35 ± 0.49% yr–1) (Andela et al. 2017)

In fact, foresters have been predicting the increase in California wildfires for some years now due to the insane “green” regulations preventing logging.

And here’s a tragically accurate view of the issue …

Meanwhile, increasing CO2 is causing increased plant growth all around the globe, which is increasing the food supplies of humans and animals alike. Here’s the data from NASA.

See also the NASA study “The Greening Of The Earth Mitigates Surface Warming“

The value of annual farm production is on the order of five trillion dollars. The ~10% increase in plant growth is giving us $500 billion dollars per year of increased food and fiber for the world population … how come people who hate CO₂ never seem to mention that?

Perhaps it’s because honest people, including IPCC officials, have admitted that the “climate emergency” is just an excuse to redistribute global wealth.

Regarding heat, very hot days in the US (over 100°F, or 38°C) were much higher in the 1930s than at any other time in the last 125 years.

There’s no sign of the “50 million climate refugees by 2010” confidently predicted by the United Nations in 2005.

Coral atolls are not sinking below the seas, in fact many are increasing in size.

And the Great Barrier Reef, which has been claimed over and over to be a victim of coral bleaching, actually has more coral cover than at any time since records have been kept in 1985.

Strong tornadoes in the US are steadily decreasing over the last 72 years.

There’s no sign of the fabled “Sixth Wave Of Extinctions”.

Climate models have routinely predicted far greater warming than has actually occurred.

This should not surprise anyone—the intractability of climate predictions has long been recognized even by the IPCC, viz:

“In sum, a strategy must recognise what is possible. In climate research and modelling, we should recognise that we are dealing with a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore that the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible”

IPCC Third Assessment Report, The Scientific Basis 14 2 2 2, p.774

Next, all of the weather risks dramatically foretold by climate alarmists have been with us forever—flood, fire, famine, drought, heat waves, hurricanes, tornadoes, all are as ancient as the hills. We are protected from the vagaries of weather by one thing—wealth. It is the poorest of the world who are most at risk from flood, fire, and famine. When I was born, about three-quarters of the world lived on less than $1.90 per day. Now, it is less than 10% of the world living in those conditions.

This increase in wealth has been driven and fueled by one thing … energy, mostly in the form of fossil fuels.

So if we wish to keep insulating people from the age-old destructive effects of weather, we need to maintain and increase the amount of cheap energy available, especially to the poor. If you insist on fighting the imaginary climate menace, at least have the kindness and the human decency not to do it on the backs of the poor by increasing energy costs, whether by “carbon taxes” or in any other way. I discuss this most important issue in my post “We Have Met The 1%, And He Is Us.”

How about the dreaded heat waves that are supposed to be an inevitable result of “global warming”? If you need something to worry about, that’s not it … the real danger is not heat, it’s cold.

And here’s the UK Government’s assessment of the effect of more warmer days and fewer cold days … in twenty years, the warming has saved over half a million lives.

Here’s another analysis of heat vs. cold … it says that global warming is saving 160,000 lives per year through fewer cold deaths.

But if you want to worry about heat waves, please get back to me when the heat waves are worse than those of the 1930s, well before the large increase in CO2 …

Next, here is the radical change in downwelling radiation at the surface from the increase in CO2 that is supposed to be driving the “CLIMATE EMERGENCY!!!” What I’ve shown is the change that in theory would have occurred from the changes in CO2 from 1750 to the present, and the change that in theory will occur in the future when CO2 increases from its present value to twice the 1750 value. This is using the generally accepted (although not rigorously derived) claim that the downwelling radiation change from a doubling of CO2 is 3.7 watts per square metre (W/m2). The purpose is to show how small these CO2-caused changes are compared to total downwelling radiation.

The changes in downwelling radiation from the increase in CO2 are trivially small, lost in the noise …

Finally, an “emergency” is defined in the dictionary as “a serious, unexpected, and often dangerous situation requiring immediate action.” Alarmists have been warning us over and over about the purported impending “emergency” for 50 years, so it is hardly “unexpected”. None of their endless predictions of imminent tragedy have come true, and despite decades of warning, no significant “immediate action” has been taken … so by definition, it can’t be an emergency. 

Let me close with this most excellent overview of deaths from every kind of natural disasters, from Our World In Data. We are indeed living in the best of times.

For five decades, we’ve been told every year that we only have five, ten, or twenty years before disaster … I mean, seriously, how can people still believe these serially failed doomcasters?

So before we spend trillions of dollars on an unachievable plan to totally redo the entire global energy supply, how about we wait until someone can actually let us in on the big secret—just where is this mysterious “CLIMATE EMERGENCY!!!”, and when did it start?

My very best wishes to all, and take a deep breath—there’s no impending Thermageddon™ just around the corner …

w.

FURTHER IMAGES: If you have other images showing that the world is not experiencing a “climate emergency”, please link to them and I may add them to the head post. No guarantees.

MY REQUEST: When you comment, please quote the exact words you are discussing. This will avoid much of the misunderstanding that plagues the intarwebs.

THE IPCC VIEW: Here are some representative quotes from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) regarding what the scientists have “low confidence” in (emphasis mine). Be aware that in IPCCSpeak, “low confidence” means that there is only one chance in five that a statement is correct … not odds you’d want to bet your entire economy on.

DIRECT QUOTES FROM VARIOUS IPCC REPORTS

The impacts of changes in flood characteristics are also highly dependent on how climate changes in the future, and as noted in Section 3.5.2, there is low confidence in projected changes in flood magnitude or frequency.

There are inconsistent patterns of change in heavy precipitation in Africa and partial lack of data; hence there is low confidence in observed precipitation trends

There is medium confidence in projected poleward shifts of mid-latitude storm tracks but low confidence in detailed regional projections

There is thus low confidence in the level at which global warming could lead to very high risks associated with extreme weather events in the context of this report.

Low confidence in an observed global-scale trend in drought or dryness (lack of rainfall) since the 1950s, due to lack of direct observations, methodological uncertainties and choice and geographical inconsistencies in the trends

Low confidence in attributing changes in drought over global land areas since the mid20th century to human influence owing to observational uncertainties and difficulties in distinguishing decadal-scale variability in drought from long-term trends.

The IPCC AR5 (2013) stressed low confidence in a global-scale observed trend in drought, owing to lack of direct observations, dependencies of inferred trends on the index choice, as well as difficulties in distinguishing long-term climate change from decadal-scale drought variability

Tropical cyclones are projected to decrease in frequency but with an increase in the number of very intense cyclones (limited evidence, low confidence).

There is thus low confidence in the level at which global warming could lead to very high risks associated with extreme weather events in the context of this report.

Observed global changes in the water cycle, including precipitation, are more uncertain than observed changes in temperature (Hartmann et al., 2013; Stocker et al., 2013). There is high confidence that mean precipitation over the mid-latitude land areas of the Northern Hemisphere has increased since 1951 (Hartmann et al., 2013). For other latitudinal zones, area-averaged long-term positive or negative trends have low confidence because of poor data quality, incomplete data or disagreement amongst available estimates (Hartmann et al., 2013). There is, in particular, low confidence regarding observed trends in precipitation in monsoon regions, according to the SREX report (Seneviratne et al., 2012) and AR5 (Hartmann et al., 2013), as well as more recent publications (Singh et al., 2014; Taylor et al., 2017; Bichet and Diedhiou, 2018; see Supplementary Material 3.SM.2).

Consequently, the current assessment is that there is low confidence regarding changes in monsoons at these lower global warming levels, as well as regarding differences in monsoon responses at 1.5°C versus 2°C.

The IPCC AR5 assessed that there was low confidence in the sign of drought trends since 1950 at the global scale,

AR5 assessed that there was low confidence in the attribution of global changes in droughts and did not provide assessments for the attribution of regional changes in droughts (Bindoff et al., 2013a)

Such contradictions, in combination with the fact that the almost four-decade-long period of remotely sensed observations remains relatively short to distinguish anthropogenically induced trends from decadal and multi-decadal variability, implies that there is only low confidence regarding changes in global tropical cyclone numbers under global warming over the last four decades.

Likewise, CMIP5 model simulations of the historical period have not produced anthropogenically induced trends in very intense tropical cyclones (Bender et al., 2010; Knutson et al., 2010, 2013; Camargo, 2013; Christensen et al., 2013), consistent with the findings of Klotzbach and Landsea (2015). There is consequently low confidence in the conclusion that the number of very intense cyclones is increasing globally.

AR5 assessed that under high greenhouse gas forcing (3°C or 4°C of global warming) there is low confidence in projections of poleward shifts of the Northern Hemisphere storm tracks, while there is high confidence that there would be a small poleward shift of the Southern Hemisphere storm tracks (Stocker et al., 2013). In the context of this report, the assessment is that there is limited evidence and low confidence in whether any projected signal for higher levels of warming would be clearly manifested under 2°C of global warming.

Collins et al. (2013) assessed low confidence in Antarctic sea ice projections because of the wide range of model projections and an inability of almost all models to reproduce observations such as the seasonal cycle, interannual variability and the long-term slow increase.

There was low confidence due to limited evidence, however, that anthropogenic climate change has affected the frequency and magnitude of floods. WGII AR5 also concluded that there is no evidence that surface water and groundwater drought frequency has changed over the last few decades, although impacts of drought have increased mostly owing to increased water demand (Jiménez Cisneros et al., 2014)

Reduced ocean upwelling has implications for millions of people and industries that depend on fisheries for food and livelihoods (Bakun et al., 2015; FAO, 2016; Kämpf and Chapman, 2016), although there is low confidence in the projection of the size of the consequences at 1.5°C

Evidence of a slowdown of AMOC has increased since AR5 (Smeed et al., 2014; Rahmstorf et al., 2015a, b; Kelly et al., 2016), yet a strong causal connection to climate change is missing (low confidence)

The magnitude of global sea level rise that could occur over the next two centuries under 1.5°C–2°C of global warming is estimated to be in the order of several tenths of a metre according to most studies (low confidence)

That is, although restraining the global temperature increase to 2°C is projected to reduce crop losses under climate change relative to higher levels of warming, the associated mitigation costs may increase the risk of hunger in low-income countries (low confidence)

Overall, no statistically significant changes in GDP are projected to occur over most of the developed world under 1.5°C of global warming in comparison to present-day conditions, but under 2°C of global warming impacts on GDP are projected to be generally negative (low confidence)

Moreover, daily rainfall intensity and runoff is expected to increase (low confidence) towards 2°C and higher levels of global warming

A collapse in permafrost may occur (low confidence); a drastic biome shift from tundra to boreal forest is possible (low confidence)

The number of investigations into how the tree fraction may respond in the Arctic to different degrees of global warming is limited, and studies generally indicate that substantial increases will likely occur gradually (e.g., Lenton et al., 2008). Abrupt changes are only plausible at levels of warming significantly higher than 2°C (low confidence) and would occur in conjunction with a collapse in permafrost

A single model projection (Drijfhout et al., 2015) suggested that higher temperatures may induce a smaller ice fraction in soils in the tundra, leading to more rapidly warming soils and a positive feedback mechanism that results in permafrost collapse (low confidence).

Given that scenarios of 1.5°C or 2°C of global warming would include a substantially smaller radiative forcing than those assessed in the study by Jiang and Tian (2013), there is low confidence regarding changes in monsoons at these low global warming levels, as well as regarding the differences between responses at 1.5°C versus 2°C of warming.

A tipping point for significant dieback of the boreal forests is thought to exist, where increased tree mortality would result in the creation of large regions of open woodlands and grasslands, which would favour further regional warming and increased fire frequencies, thus inducing a powerful positive feedback mechanism (Lenton et al., 2008; Lenton, 2012). This tipping point has been estimated to exist between 3°C and 4°C of global warming (low confidence) (Lucht et al., 2006; Kriegler et al., 2009), but given the complexities of the various forcing mechanisms and feedback processes involved, this is thought to be an uncertain estimate.

These changes may be classified as incremental rather than representing a tipping point. Large-scale reductions in maize crop yield, including the potential collapse of this crop in some regions, may exist under 3°C or more of global warming (low confidence)

Under 3°C of global warming, significant reductions in the areas suitable for livestock production could occur (low confidence)

Tropical cyclones are projected to decrease in frequency but with an increase in the number of very intense cyclones (limited evidence, low confidence).

Climate models now include more cloud and aerosol processes, and their interactions, than at the time of the AR4, but there remains low confidence in the representation and quantification of these processes in models.

The release of CO2 or CH4 to the atmosphere from thawing permafrost carbon stocks over the 21st century is assessed to be in the range of 50 to 250 GtC for RCP8.5 (low confidence).