Expert decries UN chief's claim that climate disasters are up 500%
Source: (
https://bit.ly/3GiXIaL)
Last September, the United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres
claimed climate, weather, and water-related disasters had increased
by 500 percent over the last 50 years.
According to the political and environmental science writer Professor
Roger Pielke this is "pure misinformation." He goes on to suggest
that "you will never find a more obvious and egregious wrong claim
in public discussions from a more important institution."
Matters were made even worse, in Pielke's view, because the false
notion was "legitimized" by none other than the World Meteorological
Organisation (WMO), one of the founding bodies of the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Pielke refers to the graph above based on figures from CRED EM-DAT,
the same database the WMO and Guterres based their false claim on.
Of course 2022 is not fully complete, but total disasters will be
around the 330 mark, and this will be similar to the average for the
last decade. Compared with the 2000s, the numbers are about 10
perecnt lower.
Based on these data, said by CRED to be reliable since 2000, Pielke
notes there is no evidence that the number of global and climate
disasters is increasing. "That means that - undeniably - there is no
evidence to support another false claim by the UN that, 'The number
of disaster events is projected to reach 560 a year - or 1.5 each day,
statistically speaking - by 2030.'"
Preliminary estimates suggest that around 11,000 people lost their
lives this year as a result of weather and climate-related disasters,
a figure around the average for the last decade. The overall death
rate was about 0.14 people per million, and was one of the five
lowest annual death rates since data were compiled. Pielke ventures
that the figure is the lowest in all recorded human history. Just two
decades ago, the figure was 20 times greater at 2.9 per million. The
diminishing human impact of disasters is a science and policy success
that is "widely under-appreciated."
In fact, as the Daily Sceptic has repeatedly shown, such inconvenient
facts are largely ignored in most mainstream media, as individual
weather events are relentlessly catastrophized in the interest of
upending society, via the Net Zero political project.
Weather catastrophizing is now the main climate propaganda tool
since global warming went off the boil over two decades ago. Pielke
noted that he had spent 30 years working to understand trends in
disasters. "Along the way, I've observed a concerted and successful
effort by climate advocates to create and spread disinformation about
disasters, knowing full well that virtually all journalists and
scientists will stay silent and allow the false information to spread
unchecked - and sometimes they will even help to amplify it,"
he wrote.
"I am curious. When are journalists going to start reporting the facts
about disasters, and call out disinformation," he asked.
Don't hold your breath just yet professor, might be the reply. On
September 14, the Daily Sceptic reported that four leading Italian
scientists had undertaken a major review of historical climate
trends, and concluded that declaring a "climate emergency" was not
supported by the data. Our report went viral, was viewed over 25,000
times, retweeted over 9,000 times, and eventually made its way into
other media outlets.
It led to the inevitable 'fact-check'. State-owned Agence
France-Presse reported that "top climate experts" said the paper
"cherry picked" data. One of the experts was Friederike Otto who
works out of Imperial College London, and is at the forefront of the
pseudoscientific "attribution" of single weather events to humans
allegedly causing the climate to change. She said that "of course"
the authors were not writing the article in good faith.
"If the journal cares about science they should withdraw it loudly
and publicly, saying that it should have never been published," she
said.
As a result of this pressure, the publisher of the paper, Springer
Nature, made the following announcement: "Readers are alerted
that the conclusions reported in this manuscript are currently under
dispute. The journal is investigating the issue". Of course all
science is "under dispute" (except, it seems, the "settled" science
of climate change), but that is not the reason why this shameful
announcement was made. It remains on the paper to this day.
Pielke concluded that planet Earth is a place of extremes.
Hurricanes, floods, drought, heatwaves, and other types of extreme
weather are normal and always have been. The ability of societies
to prepare and recover from extreme events is a remarkable story
of policy success - deaths related to disasters have plummeted from
millions per year a century ago to thousands per year over the past
decade.
"Unfortunately nowadays, every weather and climate disaster becomes
enlisted as a sort of 'poster child' for climate advocacy. Every
extreme event and associated human impact is quickly turned into
a symbol of something else - such as failed energy policies,
rapacious fossil fuel companies, evil politicians, or callous
jet-setting billionaires. It is a simple and powerful narrative, and
one that is also incredibly misleading," he concluded.
