Carbon Dioxide and Earth's Future Pursuing the ... - Magazooms

5. More Frequent and Severe Storms
www.co2science.org
P a g e | 50
The claim: Among the many highly-publicized catastrophic consequences that climate alarmists
contend will attend the ongoing rise in the air’s CO2 content are predicted increases in the
frequency and severity of a variety of different types of storms.
In an effort to determine if this contention has any validity, many scientists have examined
historical and proxy storm records in an attempt to determine how temperature changes of the
past millennium may have impacted the storminess of earth’s climate. Noting that the planet's
mean temperature had risen by about 0.6 °C over the 20th century, for example, Easterling et
al. (2000) looked for possible impacts of this warming on extreme weather events that they
said “would add to the body of evidence that there is a discernable human affect on the
climate.” In doing so, however, they found few changes of significance, and -- as might have
been expected -- that “in some areas of the world increases in extreme events are apparent,
while in others there appears to be a decline,” so that the overall global response was pretty
much of a wash.
In another study of multiple severe weather phenomena, Khandekar (2003) briefly reviewed
what he had learned about extreme weather events in Canada in the course of conducting a
study of the subject for the government of Alberta. This review revealed that “extreme
weather events such as heat waves, rain storms, tornadoes, winter blizzards, etc., [were] not
increasing anywhere in Canada at [that] time,” while noting that a contemporary special issue
of Natural Hazards (Vol. 29, No. 2, June 2003) concluded much the same thing about other
parts of the world, citing in this context a survey article by Balling and Cerveny (2003) that
concluded “there is no significant increase in overall severe storm activity (hurricanes,
thunderstorms/tornadoes, winter blizzards) across the conterminous United States,” as well as
an article by Changnon (2003a), which concluded that “increasing economic loss due to
weather extremes in the conterminous United States is a result of societal change and not
global warming.”
More specifically, Changnon determined that various U.S. weather extremes over the last 50
years of the 20th century were mixed, reporting that “one trend is upwards (heavy rainsfloods),
others are downward (hail, hurricanes, tornadoes, and severe thunderstorms), and
others are unchanging flat trends (winter storms and wind storms).” It should be added,
however, that had the analysis of heavy rains-floods been extended back to the beginning of
the 20th century, the longer-term behavior of this phenomenon would have been found to
have been indicative of no net change over the past hundred years, as demonstrated by Kunkel
(2003).
Down in New Zealand, De Lange and Gibb (2000) analyzed trends in sea level derived from
several tide gauges located within Tauranga Harbor over the period 1960-1998. And in an
examination of seasonal, interannual and decadal distributions of storm surge data, they
discovered a considerable decline in their annual numbers in the latter half of the record, while
a similar trend was observed in the magnitude of storm surges.
[ search engine powered by magazooms.com ]