Have you heard about the recent horrendous trends in climate events such as hurricanes and tornados? Well, here is a paper that puts that in perspective.
Yes Virginia - it is alarmism.
"A critical assessment of extreme events trends in times of global warming", Alimonti, Mariani, Prodi, and Ricci in the European Physical Journal Plus.
Here is the link.
Here are some excerpts.
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Abstract This article reviews recent bibliography on time series of some extreme weather events and related response indicators in order to understand whether an increase in intensity and/or frequency is detectable. The most robust global changes in climate extremes are found in yearly values of heatwaves (number of days, maximum duration and cumulated heat), while global trends in heatwave intensity are not significant. Daily precipitation intensity and extreme precipitation frequency are stationary in the main part of the weather stations. Trend analysis of the time series of tropical cyclones show a substantial temporal invariance and the same is true for tornadoes in the USA. At the same time, the impact of warming on surface wind speed remains unclear. The analysis is then extended to some global response indicators of extreme meteorological events, namely natural disasters, floods, droughts, ecosystem productivity and yields of the four main crops (maize, rice, soybean and wheat). None of these response indicators show a clear positive trend of extreme events. In conclusion on the basis of observational data, the climate crisis that, according to many sources, we are experiencing today, is not evident yet. It would be nevertheless extremely important to define mitigation and adaptation strategies that take into account current trends
To date, global observations do not show any significant trends in both the number and the energy accumulated by hurricanes, as shown in Fig. 1 and as claimed in several specific papers [13] for the USA, which report the trend dating back to over 160 years ago, or for other regions of the globe [14, 15].
Particular attention should be paid to the IPCC statement which reports strong increase in the frequency and activity of tropical cyclones in the North Atlantic. To get more information on this issue, NOAA [17] analysed much longer time series (> 100 years) of Atlantic hurricane activity.
Existing records of past Atlantic tropical storms or hurricane numbers (from 1878 to present) indeed show a pronounced upward trend; however, the density of Atlantic shipping reports was relatively low during the first decades of this period: if the storms of the modern era (after 1965) had hypothetically occurred during those decades, a considerable number of storms probably would not have been observed by the naval observation network.
Therefore, after adjusting the time series to take into account the smaller observational capacities of the past, there remains only a small nominally positive upward trend of the tropical storms from 1878 to 2006. Statistical tests indicate that this trend is not significantly distinguishable from zero.
Furthermore, Landsea et al. [18] noted that the rising trend in Atlantic tropical storm counts is almost entirely due to the increase in only short-lived storms (< 2 days), which were most likely overlooked in the early parts of the record, as they would have had less opportunity for casual encounters with ship traffic.
If we look at hurricanes in the Atlantic basin, rather than all tropical storms, the result is similar: the reported number of hurricanes during the 1860s and 1880s was similar to nowadays and again there is no significant positive trend since that time. Evidence of an upward trend is even weaker for hurricanes hitting the coast of the USA, which show a slightly negative trend starting in the 1900s or late 1800s.
Although there have been increases in hurricanes hitting the coast of the USA and in hurricane counts in the Atlantic basin since the early 1970s, Fig. 2 shows that these recent increases are not representative of the observed behavior in century-long records. In short, the historic record of Atlantic hurricane frequency does not provide convincing evidence of a substantial long-term warming-induced increase.
NOAA therefore concludes that “it is premature to conclude with high confidence that increasing atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations from human activities have had a detectable impact on Atlantic basin hurricane activity” [17].
The IPPC in its AR5 [6] reports on page 44 that “conclusions regarding global drought trends increasing since the 1970s are no longer supported” and several studies indeed show no increase in the main indices regarding global drought [56, 57].
Looking at natural disasters since 1900 shown in Fig. 8, a very small number can be observed since the middle of the last century, when a sudden growth begins which stops towards the end of the twentieth century to give way to a trend marked by a slight decrease. This trend is very strange: is it possible that natural disasters essentially appeared towards the middle of the twentieth century and that they showed such dramatic growth until the end of the century? It should also be noted that this trend is at first sight “consistent” with the growth of the global temperature of the planet.
In several reports, however, CRED warned about an exclusively climatological interpretation of the increase in events observed until the end of the twentieth century: in 2004 CRED wrote [80] that their time series (Fig. 8 with data up to 2003) “might lead one to believe that disasters occur more frequently today than in the beginning of the century. However, reaching such a conclusion based only on this graph would be incorrect. In fact, what the figure is really showing is the evolution of the registration of natural disaster events over time”.
Again in 2007 [81] “Indeed, justifying the upward trend in hydro-meteorological disaster occurrence and impacts essentially through climate change would be misleading. … one major contributor to the increase in disasters occurrence over the last decades is the constantly improving diffusion and accuracy of disaster related information”.
In several reports, however, CRED warned about an exclusively climatological interpretation of the increase in events observed until the end of the twentieth century: in 2004 CRED wrote [80] that their time series (Fig. 8 with data up to 2003) “might lead one to believe that disasters occur more frequently today than in the beginning of the century. However, reaching such a conclusion based only on this graph would be incorrect. In fact, what the figure is really showing is the evolution of the registration of natural disaster events over time”.
Again in 2007 [81] “Indeed, justifying the upward trend in hydro-meteorological disaster occurrence and impacts essentially through climate change would be misleading. … one major contributor to the increase in disasters occurrence over the last decades is the constantly improving diffusion and accuracy of disaster related information”.
And this indication has been maintained over the years [82] “From a disasters analysis point of view, population growth and patterns of economic development are more important than climate change or cyclical variations in weather when explaining this upward trend. Today, not only are more people in harm’s way than there were 50 years ago, but building in flood plains, earthquakes zones and other high-risk areas has increased the likelihood that a routine natural hazard will become a major catastrophe”.
In support of this interpretation, there is also the growth of earthquakes, shown in Fig. 9, which should have nothing to do with global warming and which presents a temporal trend similar to that of all other natural disasters.
In our opinion, this confirms that the main reason of the increase in the second half of the twentieth century is the growing reporting capacity of individual states and that since this capacity has stabilized on a reliable level, the number of disasters has become stationary or has even gone down. It is the same phenomenon already observed for hurricanes and tornadoes.
Conclusions
From the Second World War, our societies have progressed enormously, reaching levels of well-being (health, nutrition, healthiness of the places of life and work, etc.) that previous generations had not even remotely imagined. Today, we are called to continue on the path of progress respecting the constraints of economic, social and environmental sustainability with the severity dictated by the fact that the planet is about to reach 10 billion inhabitants in 2050, increasingly urbanized.
Since its origins, the human species has been confronted with the negative effects of the climate; historical climatology has repeatedly used the concept of climate deterioration in order to explain negative effect of extreme events (mainly drought, diluvial phases and cold periods) on civilization. Today, we are facing a warm phase and, for the first time, we have monitoring capabilities that enable us to objectively evaluate its effects.
Fearing a climate emergency without this being supported by data, means altering the framework of priorities with negative effects that could prove deleterious to our ability to face the challenges of the future, squandering natural and human resources in an economically difficult context, even more negative following the COVID emergency. This does not mean we should do nothing about climate change: we should work to minimize our impact on the planet and to minimize air and water pollution. Whether or not we manage to drastically curtail our carbon dioxide emissions in the coming decades, we need to reduce our vulnerability to extreme weather and climate events.
Leaving the baton to our children without burdening them with the anxiety of being in a climate emergency would allow them to face the various problems in place (energy, agricultural-food, health, etc.) with a more objective and constructive spirit, with the goal of arriving at a weighted assessment of the actions to be taken without wasting the limited resources at our disposal in costly and ineffective solutions. How the climate of the twenty-first century will play out is a topic of deep uncertainty. We need to increase our resiliency to whatever the future climate will present us.
We need to remind ourselves that addressing climate change is not an end in itself, and that climate change is not the only problem that the world is facing. The objective should be to improve human well-being in the twenty-first century, while protecting the environment as much as we can and it would be a nonsense not to do so: it would be like not taking care of the house where we were born and raised.
Conclusions
From the Second World War, our societies have progressed enormously, reaching levels of well-being (health, nutrition, healthiness of the places of life and work, etc.) that previous generations had not even remotely imagined. Today, we are called to continue on the path of progress respecting the constraints of economic, social and environmental sustainability with the severity dictated by the fact that the planet is about to reach 10 billion inhabitants in 2050, increasingly urbanized.
Since its origins, the human species has been confronted with the negative effects of the climate; historical climatology has repeatedly used the concept of climate deterioration in order to explain negative effect of extreme events (mainly drought, diluvial phases and cold periods) on civilization. Today, we are facing a warm phase and, for the first time, we have monitoring capabilities that enable us to objectively evaluate its effects.
Fearing a climate emergency without this being supported by data, means altering the framework of priorities with negative effects that could prove deleterious to our ability to face the challenges of the future, squandering natural and human resources in an economically difficult context, even more negative following the COVID emergency. This does not mean we should do nothing about climate change: we should work to minimize our impact on the planet and to minimize air and water pollution. Whether or not we manage to drastically curtail our carbon dioxide emissions in the coming decades, we need to reduce our vulnerability to extreme weather and climate events.
Leaving the baton to our children without burdening them with the anxiety of being in a climate emergency would allow them to face the various problems in place (energy, agricultural-food, health, etc.) with a more objective and constructive spirit, with the goal of arriving at a weighted assessment of the actions to be taken without wasting the limited resources at our disposal in costly and ineffective solutions. How the climate of the twenty-first century will play out is a topic of deep uncertainty. We need to increase our resiliency to whatever the future climate will present us.
We need to remind ourselves that addressing climate change is not an end in itself, and that climate change is not the only problem that the world is facing. The objective should be to improve human well-being in the twenty-first century, while protecting the environment as much as we can and it would be a nonsense not to do so: it would be like not taking care of the house where we were born and raised.
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