Sunday, May 18, 2014

Climate Disruptions


As previously noted the latest buzzword from the climate charlatans is "climate disruptions." Jerry Brown is blaming the current drought in California on "climate deniers" such as myself ... see: Breitbart Story . (Actually, I don't understand how anyone can deny such a thing as "climate.") Anyhow, to see how many climate disruptions that we have had in the 20th century, I went to Google and found the following table of natural disasters ranked by loss of life ... see: Natural Disasters of the 20th Century.  Peruse this table as you wish, but I will briefly summarize it here:

Droughts           26                (virtually all in Africa)
Earthquakes     25                (last one in 1990 in Iran)
Epidemics         17                (not assumed to be climate related)
Floods                 12                (none after 1959)
Typhoons           12                (last one in 1991 in Bangladesh)
Famines               4                (worst one purposely caused by Stalin)
Volcanoes           2                (Martinique, 1902 and Columbia, 1985)
Landslide             1                (Russia, 1939)
Storm                    1                (China, 1930)

(Please note that there are no hurricanes or tornadoes listed in these top 100.)

Ah, you say ... but what about the 21st century.  So I went back to Google and found the following: Top 10 Natural Disasters of the 21st Century ... which again does not include any hurricanes or tornadoes ... but does include two heat waves ... one in Europe in 2003 and one in Russia in 2010 which would have ranked 57th and 61st in the list of 20th century "disruptions.".  Is this enough evidence to scare the wits out of our children, try to starve plants of their sustenance (CO2), and turn our economies up-side down?

 I am still a doubter.

2 comments:

DEN said...

You left out Noah's flood. I'm not sure how volcanoes and earthquakes are related to climate change, but your calculus (ranking by loss of life) is a clever skew, but not convincing. We are better at communicating warnings to people about weather nowadays, so they are more prepared. Perhaps it would be more convincing to count events in the past 50 years by their measured severity and instance, or even property damage estimates?

George W. Potts said...

DEN, You are more than welcome to have a go at your suggested project. Perhaps then you might learn something ...