I came across this tweet by Roger Pielke, a scientist among the better commenters on the Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW and now rebranded as climate change since the AGW thesis is, with the quality of data we have, not provable) thesis/folderol/scam/error/malarky/forecast.
I can’t get over how egregiously wrong this NYT article is
— Roger Pielke Jr. (@RogerPielkeJr) July 18, 2021
Vulnerability to weather extremes is currently lower than it has ever been - in rich and poor countries — ever!
This is one of the most significant science, technology & policy success stories of the past century👍 pic.twitter.com/6CKlYgbzdW
Well, yes. The NYT article is basically an ideological propaganda piece with virtually every claim in every paragraph subject to asterisks. If you have any doubt at all about the full extent of the AGW claims, it is almost impossible to read the piece without simply casting it aside as fake news. The article is ‘No One Is Safe’: Extreme Weather Batters the Wealthy World by Somini Sengupta. Apparently, when the untenability of Sengupts's original headline claim, Climate Change Comes for the Wealthy Nations, became so obviously untenable, they changed it to the new headline.
The biggest issue is that the quality of data is simply not there, made perhaps worse by the unreliability of the assumptions attached to the forecasting models. And worse still by the religious devotion of its most ardent supporters.
Just to bring myself up to date, I spent five minutes reading the NYT article and then about an hour trying to chase down data to validate the plethora of claims. The whole article is written as if the reader accepts on faith the reality of AGW and the popularized forecasts (the technical forecasts of the IPCC tend to be much more conservative and the real numbers always come in at the bottom of the forecasted range).
Pielke, with the attached research documenting reduced property damage from extreme weather goes a long ways towards refuting that particular claim. Every time I have looked at it for the US, it has been an untrue claim. There is an inherent complexity of demographic increase, wealth increase, changes in geographical distribution, changes in building codes, inflation, etc.
Basically, the nation is far more populous in 2021 than, say, 1900. In 1900 there were 76 million residents in the US and in 2020 there were 328 million. If the weather and climate were exactly the same, ceteris paribus, there must be more damage now than then, even if the weather/climate hasn't changed.
Moreover, we are more than 4 times richer per capita now than then. With that increase in income and wealth, more people have built more structures in more vulnerable locations, for example summer homes on hurricane prone coasts.
All in all, we would expect there to be dramatically more damage. But a countervailing trend has been a dramatic improvement in building codes and requirements. Jurisdictions require significantly improved materials and construction practices to reduce damage and. perhaps more influentially, so do insurance companies.
We have more absolute real capital structures exposed to extreme weather events but that is offset by better and more dependable construction practices and construction materials.
Is more extreme weather causing excess damage than we would expect? It is not a straightforward claim to support owing to these measurement and definitional issues.
Even the data we do have basically either refutes or does not sustain Sengupta's claims.
Some of Europe’s richest countries lay in disarray this weekend, as raging rivers burst through their banks in Germany and Belgium, submerging towns, slamming parked cars against trees and leaving Europeans shellshocked at the intensity of the destruction.
Except that Europe has always had extreme weather events. You read any history at all, but especially economic history, going back to the 1600s and even earlier (though the documentation becomes less and less robust), the narrative is always being interrupted by extreme droughts, and freezing winters, flooding, etc. What is happening this year is certainly not exceptional when considered from an historical view.
Even recent history is full of examples. I have been watching the flooding in Germany and lightly thinking to myself, this is a lot like the floods ten or fifteen years ago. But it wasn't critical, so I didn't check.
With the prompt of these hysterical claims by Sengupta, I check. It was actually 2002 when the last big floods occurred in Germany. 110 people dead and 15 billion euros in property losses.
In the US, we have localized floods all the time by state or region, but who can forget the staggering flooding of the Mississippi basin in the Great Flood of 1993. The flooding continued for four months causing some $27 billion in damage (inflation adjusted). But only 32 deaths. A fantastic example that extreme weather events, while still tragically dangerous, are far better mitigated today than in the past.
See for example, the Galveston Hurricane of 1900 resulting in a billion dollars in damage but 6-12,000 deaths. Or the Great Blizzard of 1880 when 400 people lost their lives over three days.
Back to the European example, today's German river floods don't hold a candle to the North Sea Flood of 1953 when a spring tide in combination with North Sea storms caused storm surges in Belgium, Netherlands, England and Scotland. 2,600 people lost their lives, several billions in property damage and destruction, nearly 10% of the land in the Netherlands was flooded as were 160,000 acres in England.
And for England, the North Sea Flood was merely the worst of the 20th Century. It was not the worst of all time.
The point being that, in addition to the academic research that there are tremendous weather events in the past few decades and hundred years that far outstrip what is occurring today in Europe and North America, either in deaths or in economic impact.
Sengupta trots out a range of current weather events that are tragic and couches them in breathless prose as part of her AGW argument. But she never acknowledges that these current weather instances are all within the normal ranges of such climate events in Europe whether looking at a decade or century unit of measure.
Yes they are tragic, but do they foreshadow anything? It is not clear that they do.
And for a given weather event of dimensions X (volume, energy, force, etc.) people are far more likely to survive today than even fifty years ago and the cost, in inflation adjusted dollars, is likely to be less even though the built environment is far more extensive.
Sengupta really gets into the swing of exaggerated claims.
In the United States, flooding has killed more than 1,000 people since 2010 alone, according to federal data.
Let's say that averages 200 people a year killed by flooding. Tragic, certainly, but in a 330 million person country? A statistical gnat.
Then there is this cherry picked statistic:
In the Southwest, heat deaths have spiked in recent years.
But as Sengupta's linked article notes, the Southwest is an exception and a puzzle.
Still, the fact that deaths have already increased so rapidly in Nevada and Arizona is surprising, according to David Hondula, a professor at the School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning at Arizona State University. He said heat deaths have generally been declining in the United States, thanks to changes like better health care, more air-conditioning and improved weather forecasting.
Heat deaths are nationally declining but Sengupta, to try and bolster the AGW panic focuses on the Southwest. The linked article strains mightily to make the case that the US will see rising heat deaths owing to climate change, but the facts on the ground keep getting in the way.
Experts say the death toll is likely to reflect the growing ranks of vulnerable groups, and the failure to protect those groups from global warming.
A particularly vulnerable group, experts say, are the homeless, especially in Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix. “The unsheltered homeless population in Maricopa County has risen every year by about 25 percent since 2014,” said Lisa Glow, chief executive officer of Central Arizona Shelter Services. “We have been turning away hundreds monthly who need shelter.”
It seems pretty clear that rising heat deaths is not a function of climate change or possibly even weather change. It is a function of urban policy. Urban policy because homelessness has also been declining across the US for the past decade. Where it is rising, it is rising because of particular urban policies.
AGW is serving as a cover for bad urban governance with regard to encouraging homelessness and bad urban governance of those unsheltered.
Back to Sengupta's original fantasy apocalypse piece. She spends a fair amount of time on the global politics of AGW, as if this were a serious issue. Then she acknowledges in paragraph seventeen, a pretty pertinent reality.
Indeed, even since the 2015 Paris Agreement was negotiated with the goal of averting the worst effects of climate change, global emissions have kept increasing. China is the world’s biggest emitter today. Emissions have been steadily declining in both the United States and Europe, but not at the pace required to limit global temperature rise.
The USA has had by far the best CO2 emissions reduction of any large developed nation, far outstripping the big countries in Europe. The US has pursued a much more pragmatic approach than Europe. The US has focused on some energy efficiency initiatives, but the biggest reduction has come from a switch to cheap natural gas with a low carbon impact.
Europe, as with a small handful of states in the US, has instead forced a higher cost structure fo energy by closing nuclear plants, forbidding fracking and instead of switching to natural gas, relying on alternative energy sources which have not only increased costs (and decreased incomes) but have also made electric grids far more vulnerable to failure.
Sengupta wants to beat the rich world horse and focuses the near entirety of the article on the US and Europe whereas the real culprit for the past couple of decades has been China. A nation which pays no regard to the mewling of the Senguptas of the world.
Her dilemma is clear in her own words.
The events of this summer come after decades of neglect of science. Climate models have warned of the ruinous impact of rising temperatures. An exhaustive scientific assessment in 2018 warned that a failure to keep the average global temperature from rising past 1.5 degrees Celsius, compared to the start of the industrial age, could usher in catastrophic results, from the inundation of coastal cities to crop failures in various parts of the world.
The report offered world leaders a practical, albeit narrow path out of chaos. It required the world as a whole to halve emissions by 2030. Since then, however, global emissions have continued rising, so much so that global average temperature has increased by more than 1 degree Celsius (about 2 degrees Fahrenheit) since 1880, narrowing the path to keep the increase below the 1.5 degree Celsius threshold.
Whether you agree with AGW or not, as a matter of logic, if Europe and North America are actually reducing their emissions while China is dramatically increasing its emissions, then where should a good hysterical AGW fanatic focus her efforts? China of course. But that is not where the graft is for a North America based "journalist."
Forget logic, even the evidence is meager.
For instance, Dr. Otto and a team of international researchers concluded that the extraordinary heat wave in the Northwestern United States in late June would almost certainly not have occurred without global warming.
That's pretty mealy-mouthed. "Would almost certainly not have occurred without global warming." That's a conclusion so weak as to be easily dismissed. Additionally, I have read that average temperatures in the northwest this year are about 10 degrees above normal. Given that even the most enthusiastic AGW fanatics are reluctant to claim more than a 2 degree increase in global warming already (a claim fiercely debated), it sure sounds like either the tragic fires are pure weather events within the normal historical bounds or that possibly there would be no fires if the temperature were only 8 degrees above normal. Again, a weak argument.
Sengupta follows with another ill-supported and weasel worded claim:
And even though it will take extensive scientific analysis to link climate change to last week’s cataclysmic floods in Europe, a warmer atmosphere holds more moisture and is already causing heavier rainfall in many storms around the world. There is little doubt that extreme weather events will continue to be more frequent and more intense as a consequence of global warming. A paper published Friday projected a significant increase in slow-moving but intense rainstorms across Europe by the end of this century because of climate change.
Italics are for weasel claims and Bold is for highly disputed claims.
This mirrors the debate two or three years ago when the US had more hurricanes (an extreme weather event) than in recent years (which had been a major lull). The AGW people went crazy with claims that hurricanes were the new normal because of AGW and that there were more and stronger hurricanes all over the world. All of which was untrue when investigators went back to the numbers. There are as many hurricanes as usual based on historical ebbs and flows and they seem to be of comparable strength as in the past.
I am certain that many storms are having heavier rainfalls around the world but that is irrelevant to Sengupta's argument. It is going to be equally true that many storms have lighter rainfalls. What we want to know is 1) are there more rainstorms, 2) are they heavier and more intense, and 3) is precipitation increasing? Sengupta neither asks these questions pertinent to her assertion, nor does she answer them. She merely makes an irrelevant claim of dubious accuracy.
Sengupta's entire article is concocted of dubious claims about weather events shoehorned into the climate debate, flat assertions of claims which are hotly disputed, forecasts which are mere opinions, and a studied avoidance of contradictory evidence.
If you were an AGW zealot at the beginning, Sengupta's article is a nice recap of AGW arguments. If you are neutral or skeptical, Sengupta's whoppers and misdirects leave a feeling that there is no there to the AGW argument. There is no evidence.
And the reality is that AGW is not refuted. It is simply not proven and there is a mass of contradicting evidence. Sengupta, by bad reporting, deals herself out of respectable debate.
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