Links tagged “doughts”

Bjorn Lomborg: Droughts: For drought, the IPCC concludes “there is low confidence in attributing changes in drought over global land areas since the mid-20th century to human influence” (IPCC 2013a, 871). Moreover, it concludes “there is low confidence in a global-scale observed trend in drought” with drought having “likely increased in the Mediterranean and West Africa and likely decreased in central North America and northwest Australia since 1950” (IPCC 2013a, 50). The IPCC repudiated previous findings from 2007, saying our “conclusions regarding global increasing trends in droughts since the 1970s are no longer supported” (IPCC 2013a, 44). This was because new data showed no increased global drought (Sheffield et al., 2012; van der Schrier et al. 2013), and one study even showed a persistent decline since 1982 (Hao et al., 2014), while the number of consecutive dry days has been declining for the last 90 years (Donat et al., 2013, 2112). 

Floods: The USGCRP summarizes the IPCC to say they “did not attribute changes in flooding to anthropogenic influence nor report detectable changes in flooding magnitude, duration, or frequency” (USGCRP 2017, 240).

Wildfires: While deforestation has reduced the amount of forests, it is likely that fires in forests have declined even in percentage of the remaining forest areas across the past century.

Hurricanes: The IPCC concludes that we cannot confidently attribute hurricanes to human influence: “There is low confidence in attribution of changes in tropical cyclone activity to human influence” (IPCC 2013a, 871). Indeed, globally, hurricanes are not getting more frequent: “current data sets indicate no significant observed trends in global tropical cyclone frequency over the past century” (

Sea level: Globally, over the past 30 years, rising sea levels have not resulted in more land underwater. Adding up all the coastal land lost and reclaimed, it turns out that the total coastal area has increased by more than 13,000 km² (Donchyts et al., 2016). This is perhaps most visibly the world's largest coast reclamation of the 80 km² of Palm Island and adjacent islands along the coast of Dubai, but across the world, many countries have shaped and extended their coastlines by land reclamation. Bangladesh, despite popular understanding, has net added about 480 km² of land in the face of sea level rise.