Allstate Should Pull this Ad and Apologize for Misleading the Public
by Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D.
I’ve been meaning to comment about this TV ad for Allstate insurance, which enraged me the first time I saw it. Allstate knows better (the insurance business deals with probability and statistics) and they knew this was a lie when they put the ad together:
In the ad, actor Dennis Haysbert says:
“A once-in-500-year storm should happen once every 500 years, right? The fact is, there have been 26 in the last decade.”
https://youtu.be/7UJlbJxI_WY
Setting aside the fact that we don’t have enough statistics to say anything meaningful about what happens over 500 years (hydrologists prefer to stick to 100 years as justified when talking about rare events), Allstate knows very well that such statistics refer to the repeat period for the same location… not for (say) the whole United States. It is not unusual for once-in-100 year weather events to occur more than once, maybe several times, each year somewhere in the U.S.
I consider this false advertising because Allstate knows better, and is purposely misleading the public to make more money.
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Related:
Climatologist Roy Spencer pointed out that those claims were unsubstantiated. “Unfortunately, there seems to be a trend toward classifying events as ‘1 in 1,000 years,’ when there is no way of knowing such things…Remember, it is perfectly normal to have a 1 in 100-year event every year…as long as they occur in different locations. That’s how weather records work.”
Marc Morano on “The Weather Lottery”: Your chance of winning the lottery is very low, but the chance of someone, somewhere winning the lottery are very high. The climate campaigners and the media essentially hype the “winners” of the extreme weather lottery, wherever they are, and attempt to imply these events are happening everywhere. Extreme weather always strikes somewhere at some time, and it always will, so there is no shortage of examples of “record” storms. Lotteries and casinos do the same thing in their ads—showing the winners, and implying that you are just one ticket or spin away from joining them.
Meteorologist Topper Shutt explained the misuse of the term 100-year flood after Hurricane Harvey hit Houston in 2017. “A 500-year flood does not mean that an area will see a flood of that magnitude once in 500 years. It means that in any given year there is a .2% chance of a 500-year flood and likewise a 1% chance every year for a 100-year flood,” Shutt wrote. “Remember, we are talking about billions of years of climate and usually just a hundred years of actual, observational data.”
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But the new best-selling book, “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change,” refutes this notion and explains the significance behind the claims 1 in 100, 1 in 500 or 1 in 1000 year weather events.
Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from author Marc Morano’s new 2018 best-selling book, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change.
(Move over Rachel Carson! – Morano’s Politically Incorrect Climate Book outselling ‘Silent Spring’ at Earth Day – Order Your Book Copy Now! ‘The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change’ By Marc Morano)
Book Excerpt – Chapter 12 – “Not So Extreme”
Floods and Heavy Rains
Peer-reviewed studies and current data refute the claims that global warming is making floods worse. Extreme weather expert Roger Pielke Jr. asked, “Are US floods increasing? The answer is still ‘No,’ A new paper…in the Hydrological Sciences Journal shows that flooding has not increased in U.S. over records of 85 to 127 years. This adds to a pile of research that shows similar results around the world,” Pielke wrote.
Pielke explained that the UN IPCC had found, “[n]o gauge based evidence…for a climate-driven, globally widespread change in the magnitude and frequency of floods.” He asked, “How about IPCC SREX authors on floods?…‘A direct statistical link between anthropogenic climate change and trends in the magnitude/frequency of floods has not been established.’”
Pielke pointed out, “Flood disasters are sharply down. U.S. floods not increasing either.” Admittedly, “Floods suck when they occur. The good news is U.S. flood damage is sharply down over 70 years.”
The National Academy of Sciences’ review of its draft 2017 “Climate Science Special Report” said that “within the existing literature, few locations show statistically significant changes in flooding nor have they [changes in flooding] been clearly linked to precipitation or temperature.” The report added that flooding was exhibiting “no clear national trend.”
Tony Heller of Real Science explained, “The world’s ten deadliest floods all occurred before 1976.” In other words, “all of the world’s deadliest floods occurred with CO2 well below 350 PPM.”
A 2011 U.S. government study titled “Has the Magnitude of Floods across the USA Changed with Global CO2 Levels?” found no evidence that manmade climate change had caused more severe flooding during the past hundred years in the United States. Currently, “we do not see a clear pattern that enables us to understand how climate change will alter flood conditions in the future,” U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) scientist Robert Hirsch explained. The report, published in the Hydrological Sciences Journal, found “In none of the four regions [of the U.S.] defined in this study is there strong statistical evidence for flood magnitudes increasing with increasing global mean carbon dioxide concentration. One region, the southwest, showed a statistically significant negative relationship between [rising CO2] and flood magnitudes.” Nevertheless, the USGS pleaded for more study (and money!). The Hill newspaper reported that, according to the authors of the report, “More research is necessary to better understand the relationship
between climate change and flooding.”
In 2015, Robert Holmes, USGS’s National Flood Hazard Coordinator, reported, “USGS research has shown no linkage between flooding (either increases or decreases) and the increase in greenhouse gases. Essentially, from USGS long-term streamgage data for sites across the country with no regulation or other changes to the watershed that could influence the streamflow, the data shows no systematic increases in flooding through time.”
In September 2017, after Hurricane Harvey’s massive flooding in Houston, yet another peer-reviewed study revealed that flooding was not on the rise. The findings, published in the Journal of Hydrology, “provide a firmer foundation and
support the conclusion of the IPCC (Hartmann et al., 2013) that compelling evidence for increased flooding at a global scale is lacking.”
According to the study, “the number of significant trends was about the number expected due to chance alone” and the “changes in the frequency of major floods are dominated by multidecadal variability.”
The media and climate activists like to hype individual rare storm events, but these claims don’t hold up to scrutiny, either. South Carolina’s “thousand-year flood” in 2015 turned out to be wildly overhyped as “the majority of USGS streamgages had flood peaks that were less than 10-year floods,” according to the USGS analysis, which also found “no linkage between flooding and increase in greenhouse gasses” in the United States. In fact, a USGS report found, “The majority of USGS streamgages had flood peaks that were less than 10-year floods” and the “analysis show[ed] NO indication that a 1000-year flood discharge occurred at any USGS streamgages.”
In 2017 Al Gore overcranked the hype when he claimed that Hurricane Harvey’s rainfall totals constituted a “once-in-25,000-year event” and in some parts of Texas, a “once-in-500,000-year event.”
Climatologist Roy Spencer pointed out that those claims were unsubstantiated. “Unfortunately, there seems to be a trend toward classifying events as ‘1 in 1,000 years,’ when there is no way of knowing such things. This is especially true for floods, where paving of urban and suburban areas causes increasing runoff, making river flooding worse for the same amount of rainfall. This is a big reason why flood events have gotten worse in the last 100 years. . . . it has nothing to do with ‘climate change.’” Spencer also explained, “Remember, it is perfectly normal to have a 1 in 100-year event every year…as long as they occur in different locations. That’s how weather records work.”
★★★★★
The Weather Lottery
Your chance of the winning the lottery is very low, but the chance of someone, somewhere winning the lottery are very
high. The climate campaigners and the media essentially hype the “winners” of the extreme weather lottery, wherever
they are, and attempt to imply these events are happening everywhere. Extreme weather always strikes somewhere at some time, and it always will, so there is no shortage of examples of “record” storms. Lotteries and casinos do the same thing in their ads—showing the winners, and implying that you are just one ticket or spin away from joining them.
★★★★★
Meteorologist Topper Shutt explained the misuse of the term 100-year flood after Hurricane Harvey hit Houston in 2017. “A 500-year flood does not mean that an area will see a flood of that magnitude once in 500 years. It means that in any given year there is a .2% chance of a 500-year flood and likewise a 1% chance every year for a 100-year flood,” Shutt wrote. “Remember, we are talking about billions of years of climate and usually just a hundred years of actual, observational data. Secondly, urban development reduces the surface of the ground that allows the rain to permeate into the ground. Adding parking lots, more roads and driveways create more runoff. Thirdly, at least in the case of Houston 1000s of homes have been built close to streams, creeks and bayous that should have never been built in the first place.”
★★★★★
New Lyrics to an Old Tune
Ironically, heavy rains were said to be caused by “global cooling” in the 1970s. Time magazine in an article titled “Another
Ice Age?” warned that a cooling climate was responsible for such bad weather events in 1974: “During 1972 record rains in
parts of the U.S., Pakistan and Japan caused some of the worst flooding in centuries.”
