Links tagged “drought”

Bjorn Lomborg: 'Sadly, accurate science doesn’t make for good television; predicting the end of times does.'

But even this report revealed: “Drought statistics over the entire contiguous US have declined,” the report finds, reminding us that “the Dust Bowl era of the 1930s remains the benchmark drought and extreme heat event.”

Report also found: On flooding, the assessment accepts the IPCC’s finding, which “did not attribute changes in flooding to anthropogenic [human] influence nor report detectable changes in flooding magnitude, duration or frequency.”

CNN’s headline, screaming that “climate change will shrink [US] economy” by 10 percent, a figure also repeated on The New York Times front page. Actually, the UN’s climate scenarios envision US GDP per capita will more than triple by the end of this century, so this 10 percent reduction would come from an economy 300 percent larger than it is today....So, even a 5 percent reduction in the size of the American economy only follows from picking unlikely worst-case scenarios.

The well-reported idea that warming will shrink the economy by 10 percent disregards huge economic growth, assumes twice the damages of the worst-case temperatures the report itself expects and even then only finds such high costs stemming almost exclusively from easily preventable heat deaths.

Conjecturing that the temperature-mortality relationship in the US would remain constant over a century is ludicrous.

Meteorologist Cliff Mass: It is more than unfortunate that some politicians, environmental advocacy groups, and activist scientists are attempting to use this tragedy as a tool for their own agenda, make the claim that the Camp Fire was result of global warming...it has little impact the Camp Fire and many of the coastal California fires of the past few years (e.g., the Wine Country Fires of October 2017).  And blaming global warming takes attention away from the actions needed to prevent such tragedies from happening again. 

Now let me prove to you that global warming had nothing to do with the dry conditions near Paradise on the morning of November 8.  Below is a plot of the ten-hour fuel moisture at the nearby Jarbo Gap observation side, a site that was in the path of the fire, for the five years ending November 20.  You will note a repeatable pattern, with values reaching around 27% during the winter, but 3-8% every summer and early fall.  The fuels are not getting progressively drier.

Dr. Roger Pielke on The US National Climate Assessment and Weather Extremes: 

Drought: “drought statistics over the entire CONUS have declined … no detectable change in meteorological drought at the global scale”

Hurricanes: “there is still low confidence that any reported long-term (multidecadal to centennial) increases in TC activity are robust”

“IPCC AR5 did not attribute changes in flooding to anthropogenic influence nor report detectable changes in flooding magnitude, duration, or frequency”

In the US “”increasing & decreasing flooding magnitude but does not provide robust evidence that these trends are attributable to human influences… no formal attribution of observed flooding changes to anthropogenic forcing has been claimed"

The data says what it says. There is precious little evidence that extremes have become worse in the US since at least 1900, with the exception of more winter storms since 1950 and overall fewer cold spells. Attribution is weak to nonexistent.

Gore: Man-made global warming caused drought and then upheaval in Syria which led to 'flow of refugees' to UK which led to Brexit vote

Gore: The [Syrian civil ]war broke out in 2011 as people took to the streets during the Arab Spring protest movement against dictators in the Middle East. President Bashar Assad responded by sending in the troops. Mr Gore said this had produced an “incredible flow of refugees into Europe, which is creating political instability and which contributed in some ways to the desire of some in the UK to say ‘whoa, we’re not sure we want to be part of that anymore’”. He said this kind of political instability was being felt by a number of countries around the world. “Some countries have a hard time even in the best of seasons but the additional stress this climate crisis is causing really poses the threat of some political disruption and chaos of a kind the world would find extremely difficult to deal with,” Mr Gore said.

2015 claim: Global warming caused drought ‘Helped Spark Syrian War’ – 1933 claim: ‘YO-YO BANNED IN SYRIA – Blamed For Drought’ 

The U.S. has not seen a major hurricane — Category 3 or higher — make landfall since Hurricane Wilma hit on Oct. 24 2005. The nearly decade-long hurricane drought has come as a big surprise to climate scientists and environmentalists who have argued that global warming will make storms more frequent and intense.