A report from—of all sources—the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is throwing cold water on the idea that climate change, whether man-made or natural, is responsible for any net increase in damaging global extreme weather events. From this report by Andrew Orlowski (and the full IPCC report is at this link):
“There is medium evidence and high agreement that long-term trends in normalized losses have not been attributed to natural or anthropogenic climate change,” writes the IPCC in its new Special Report on Extremes (SREX) published today.
“The statement about the absence of trends in impacts attributable to natural or anthropogenic climate change holds for tropical and extratropical storms and tornados,” the authors conclude, adding for good measure that “absence of an attributable climate change signal in losses also holds for flood losses”.
Is that perfectly clear? Well, if you read those lines three or four times I think you’ll perceive that what it is saying is that there’s nothing to say regarding any increase in damage from extreme weather due to “climate change.”
So what about all the weird weather everywhere, and all the weather-related disasters of the past decade or so?
It’s the shark attack syndrome. Someone is attacked by a shark, and suddenly every shark-related incident gets special attention and people say, “Why are all the sharks suddenly attacking?” But the sharks are just doing what they always do. Chowing down on anything handy. It’s our perception and perspective that’s been altered. Our perception of the weather, and how we respond to unusual weather, has been altered by years and years of talk about global warming and climate change.
Weather has always been murder. Since the beginning of human existence on this planet, people have been killed by “extreme weather” events. Droughts, hurricanes, floods, blizzards, heat waves … they’ve been killing us by the millions for years, destroying our homes, wrecking our cities and ruining our vacations. Extreme weather events are, in that sense, completely normal. The abnormal thing would be the absence of extreme weather events.
The IPCC is not saying that there is no climate change (of-course we’re not allowed to say “global warming” anymore). Their very reason for being is the belief that there is. And of-course climates do change, in the natural course of things, so there is no way to ever prove that no climate change is taking place. People can only argue about degree and the causes and whether and how it might change more in the future. What the lines above from this report are indicating is that even though the IPCC perceives changes in climate, they cannot find figures to substantiate the idea that the changes in climate are causing a net increase in damage from extreme weather events. This is in line with commonsense, surprisingly enough, and fits with the following point of view expressed by some who oppose the Global Warming Industry: Even if the climate is indeed warming, there is no reason to label it as a global catastrophe. A warming of the climate can have positive local effects that balance out other negative local effects. For example—and this is a biggie—increasing the amount of land available for productive agriculture. It is no coincidence that history shows that human beings have flourished most during warm periods and civilization has struggled during colder ones.
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Of-course, since so much of the global environmentalist movement—which has long had many laudable aims and achievements—has been hijacked by radicals with a fundamentally anti-human agenda, perhaps the increased flourishing of humankind is exactly what they fear.