In nearly every presentation on global warming, we hear that floods and droughts will be more severe as the temperature rises. Believe it or not, and who would not believe it given thousands of websites on the issue, there are many scientists who believe the opposite. We have covered these topics in many previous essays, and a recent article in Quaternary Science Reviews reinforces our skeptical viewpoint.
Recall our long essay series a few years (e.g., here) ago regarding the now-debunked “Hockey Stick” depiction of hemispheric and/or global temperatures. In 2001, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) rolled out a depiction of temperatures over the past 1,000 years, and as seen below (Figure 1), the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age all but disappeared, and the warming rate of the most recent 100 years looked nothing short of incredible. The second plot below (Figure 2) comes from the most recent IPCC assessment, and note that (a) the plot is clearly labeled as “Northern Hemisphere,” (b) the recent warming looks less impressive, and (c) the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age periods are more prominent.
This hurricane issue never goes away and new websites appear every day warning us of more hurricanes in the immediate future. We cover this issue over and over, and no fewer than three more articles on hurricane activity have appeared in the scientific literature recently of interest to us at World Climate Report:
Wow. What a week.
I just got back from a seminar led by Rutgers University professor Dr. Alan Robock on his new research into nuclear winter. He started out by stating that “This is worse than global warming.”
Yikes! Just what I needed to hear, another disaster scenario to add to the list!!
A few months have passed since our last hurricane update, and sure enough, two more interesting articles have appeared recently in leading scientific journals. Despite a relative calm over the past few years on the hurricane front, the global warming crowd continues to insist on thousands of websites that hurricanes are becoming more frequent and intense due to the ongoing buildup of greenhouse gases. Their claims are looking more silly every day, but they fully understand that some other Katrina-like disaster is always in our future, so they seem to be patiently waiting for the next major photo opportunity.
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