Before the national media became dominated by coronavirus news, the most common news story was about global warming and how it was causing extreme weather events such as fires, heatwaves, tropical storms and floods. Fires in Australia and floods in the UK were the headline stories in the past year.
As investors it is clearly something that you need to be informed about. Such natural catastrophes won’t just affect insurance companies but the economy overall if such events are becoming more common. But are they? The following note has been recently published by Paul Biggs, an environmental scientist and writer on the subject.
It shows that media coverage of national disasters makes for good news stories but the comments on it by journalists and broadcasters are often inaccurate. We probably have a lot more to fear from global pandemics.
Abbreviations: IPCC: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, SREX: Special Report on Extreme Weather.
Weather Disaster Losses
Peer-reviewed science does not support any claim that disaster losses have been increasing due to climate change, man-made or otherwise (Reference 1).
Hurricanes and Tropical Cyclones
The detection and attribution in trends due to human-caused climate change in Tropical Cyclones, including Hurricanes, has NOT been achieved (1) (2).
UN IPCC AR5 concludes: “In summary there continues to be a lack of evidence and thus ‘low confidence’ regarding the sign of the trend in the magnitude and/or frequency of floods on a global scale.” IPCC SREX authors helpfully conclude that “the problem of flood losses is mostly about what we do on or to the landscape and that will be the case for decades to come.” (1)
IPCC SREX: “There is ‘low confidence’ in observed trends in phenomenon such as Tornadoes and Hail…the data are suggestive of an actual decline in Tornado incidence..” (1)
IPCC/SREX: “There is ‘low confidence’ in detection and attribution in changes in drought over global land areas since the mid-20th century. (1)
High temperatures are not a big driver of disaster losses. The IPCC says that there is ‘medium confidence’ that globally the length and frequency of warm spells, including heat waves, has increased since the mid-20th century. The IPCC believes that it is ‘very likely’ that human influence has contributed to these changes, but this relies heavily on climate models that are unable to pin down the exact climate sensitivity to CO2. The extreme 6C model known as RCP8.5 is now generally regarded by more rational scientists as ‘implausible.’ The range is now effectively 1.5C to 3C, with recent published evidence supporting a sensitivity below 2C. (3)
(1) The Rightful Place of Science: Disasters and Climate Change: https://tinyurl.com/yx5kfyos
(2) New WMO Assessment of Tropical Cyclones and Climate Change, Lee et al 2020: https://tinyurl.com/wgqoxm6
(3) Climate sensitivity in the light of the latest energy imbalance evidence: https://tinyurl.com/sawhd28
Roger Lawson (Twitter: https://twitter.com/RogerWLawson )
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