Links tagged “tornados”

Media & NOAA hyped claims: Record 22 Billion-Dollar Weather Disasters Struck the U.S. in 2020, NOAA Says

But Bjorn Lomborg rebuts: "Tremendously misleading. The number of billion-dollar disasters will of course increase as society gets richer. When corrected for increased wealth, the world and the US are not seeing increasing damages (but insignificantly *decreasing* damages)." - "Despite breathless climate reporting, the relative cost of global weather catastrophes 1990-2020 not increasing (actually insignificantly decreasing)."

Prof. Roger Pielke Jr.: "NOAA is a great agency & contributes massively to saving life and property. It is thus so embarrassing that they dabble in bad economics for media catnip and clicks. Everything you hear about 'billion $ disasters' is wrong."

Meteorologist Anthony Watts: "The United States in 2020 experienced fewer tornadoes than average, continuing a long-term trend of fewer of the deadly, extreme-weather events. The National Weather Service Storm Prediction Center (NWSSPC) reports 1,247 U.S. tornadoes in 2020, as shown in the graph below from the NWSSPC website...The official data show trends in observed U.S. tornadoes have been declining down over the past 15 years." ... 

"7 of past 9 years have been below the mean for U.S. Tornadoes, which is reflecting a long-term downward trend. Because the vast majority of tornadoes globally occur in the United States, this means that global tornadoes are becoming less frequent, also. ... 11 of the past 15 years have been below the mean for U.S. Tornado counts as well."

Meteorologist Anthony Watts: "New data shows the global climate-related death risk has dropped by over 99% since 1920. Despite the near constant caterwauling from climate alarmists that we are in a “climate emergency”, real-world data, release at the end of 2020 shows that climate related deaths are now approaching zero. The data spans 100 years of “global warming” back to 1920 and shows “climate related” deaths now approaching zero. Above is an update of the graph in the 2020 peer-reviewed article by Bjørn Lomborg: Welfare in the 21st century: Increasing development, reducing inequality, the impact of climate change, and the cost of climate policies."

Bjorn Lomborg reports: “Back in the 1920s, the death count from climate-related disasters was 485,000 on average every year. In the last full decade, 2010-2019, the average was 18,357 dead per year or 96% lower. In the first year of the new decade, 2020, the preliminary number of dead was even lower at 8,086 — 98% lower than the 1920s average.

But because the world’s population also quadrupled at the same time, the climate-related *death risk* has dropped even faster. The death risk is the probability of you dying in any one year. In the 1920s, it was 243 out of a million people that would die from climate-related disasters. In the 2010s, the risk was just 2.5 per million people — a drop of 99%. Now, in 2020, the preliminary number is 1 per million — 99.6% lower.”

Extreme weather expert Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. comments on new study: "It also has a nice one-paragraph summary of most recent IPCC conclusions on "natural hazards (not disasters)."

New peer-reviewed study in journal Environmental Hazards by Dr. Roger Pielke, Jr. -  Economic “Normalization” of Disaster Losses 1998-2020: A Literature Review and Assessment

"A few years in the making, a robust peer review process": "A very strong, bottom-line conclusion across the normalization literature is that evidence signal of human-caused climate change in the form of increased global economic losses from more frequent or more intense weather extremes has not yet been detected."

Dr. Roger Pielke Jr.: " Of these 54 studies:
53 focus on weather or climate
39 find no trends after normalization
8 find decreasing trends
5 find increasing
1 finds mixed trends