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One of the most persistent claims in the climate debate is that global warming leads to more extreme weather. Green groups and even such respectable outlets as Scientific American declare that “extreme weather is a product of climate change.”

And the meme seems irresistible as a political shortcut to action. President Obama has explicitly linked a warming climate to “more extreme droughts, floods, wildfires and hurricanes.” The White House warned this summer of “increasingly frequent and severe extreme weather events that come with climate change.”


Yet this is not supported by science. “General statements about extremes are almost nowhere to be found in the literature but seem to abound in the popular media,” climate scientist Gavin Schmidt of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies said last month. “It’s this popular perception that global warming means all extremes have to increase all the time, even though if anyone thinks about that for 10?seconds they realize that’s nonsense.”

Global warming is real. It is partly man-made. It will make some things worse and some things better. Overall, the long-run impact will be negative. But some of the most prominent examples of extreme weather are misleading, and some weather events are becoming less extreme.

The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) delivered a 600-page reporton extreme weather in 2011. It got little attention — because it is nuanced.

Global warming, in general, will mean higher temperatures. This causes more heat waves — more extreme weather. But it also causes fewer cold waves — less extreme weather. Many more people die from excessive cold than excessive heat, so fewer people will die from cold and heat in the future. By mid-century, researchers estimated in 2006, that means about 1.4?million fewer deaths per year. In the continental United States, heat waves in the past decade exceeded the norm by 10 percent, but the number of cold waves fell 75 percent.

Moreover, global warming will mostly increase temperatures during winter, at night and in cold places, making temperature differences less extreme.

Global warming will also cause more heavy rain; this is clearly more extreme. But warming will also help alleviate water scarcity — less extreme. About 1.2 billion fewer people are expected to live with water scarcity by the end of the century because of increased precipitation.

Drought is expected to increase in some regions while decreasing in others. Overall, the impact will probably be slightly more extreme. Likewise, sea levels will rise, which will mean more flooding of coastal structures — more extreme weather. The total impact is likely to be less than 0.1 percent of global economic output.

Hurricane wind speeds are likely to increase (more extreme), but the number of hurricanes is likely to decrease or hold steady (less extreme). The number of extra-tropical cyclones is likely to decline (less extreme).

Obama’s examples of more extreme weather from droughts, floods, wildfires and hurricanes are weak examples for the United States. Wildfire may be the only one of these indicators that is increasing in the United States, but to a large degree this is because fire suppression efforts have resulted in more material being available to burn.

The IPCC found that “droughts have become less frequent, less intense, or shorter, for example, in central North America.” A scientific overview published in June in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Societyfound that the severe drought of 2012, which at one point covered 39?percent of the United States, was still much less extreme than droughts in the 1930s (which covered 63 percent) and the 1950s (50 percent). And all those droughts pale next to the six-decade mega-drought in what is now the U.S. West in the 12th century.

Damage from flooding in the United States has declined from 0.2 percent of gross domestic product in 1940 to less than 0.05 percent today. And U.S. hurricanes have not increased in frequency, intensity or normalized damage since at least 1900. It has been more than seven years since the United States was hit by a Category 3 or stronger hurricane. That is the longest such hurricane drought since 1900.

A new paper in the journal Nature shows on a crucial measure that there is no increase in extremes. Looking at temperature variability as one kind of extreme weather, the authors document that extreme weather globally has been constant since 1960. Moreover, the researchers found that extreme weather as temperature variability will decline in the future with higher levels of carbon dioxide. They laconically conclude: “Our findings contradict the view that a warming world will automatically be one of more overall climatic variation.”

It is understandable that a lot of well-meaning people, wanting stronger action on global warming, have tried to use the meme of extreme weather to draw attention. But alarmism and panic are rarely the best way to achieve good policies. The argument that global warming generally creates more extreme weather needs to be retired.

Bjørn Lomborg, an adjunct professor at the Copenhagen Business School, directs the Copenhagen Consensus Center. He is the author of “The Skeptical Environmentalist,” “Cool It” and, most recently, “How Much Have Global Problems Cost the World? A Scorecard From 1900 to 2050.”

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The volume of sea ice in the Arctic hit a new low this past winter, according to observations from the European Space Agency's (Esa) Cryosat mission. During March/April - the time of year when marine floes are at their thickest - the radar spacecraft recorded just under 15,000 cu km of ice. In its three years of full operations, Cryosat has witnessed a continuing shrinkage of winter ice volume.

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:
You haven't noticed either the extreme (100-year) floods that swamped the Midwest, followed by the xtreme drought (which still persists in Texas), Superstorm Sandy, or the extreme floods in Colorado? Huh. Pretty narrow focus you got there.

From a layperson's POV, I think the following can be generally expected:

Higher, and increasing, global average temperatures. That stands to reason but what that means bears repeating, since some people (AHEM!) seem to forget. That doesn't mean that Juno was hotter than California this past August, or that Atlanta had an unusually wet and cool spring. When looking at average global temperatures, you have to take into account tempratures at Dalien (China), Sao Paulo, and other places around the globe. No fair picking and choosing, your assessement needs to be representative of the world as a whole.

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You haven't noticed either the extreme (100-year) floods that swamped the Midwest, followed by the xtreme drought (which still persists in Texas), Superstorm Sandy, or the extreme floods in Colorado? Huh. Pretty narrow focus you got there.

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:
No, they're not. You're just not keeping up with real news. Flooding on the Russian-Chinese border, in the Amur River drainage basin, was about 1200 miles long and 800 miles wide... that would be like a flood that covers the USA from the Canadian border to Mexico, and across all of the plains states. It is truly record-breaking. Just because you've got your head stuck in some tiny, parochial space doesn't mean there isn't a bigger world out there. Look it up.

Just before that, China suffered a record-breaking drought. All of the wells dried up. Sorry for your loss of brainspace. I've wasted enough time on you for one week.

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:
China is seeking sources of natural gas to replace coal plants. (That will be thru Kyrgystan.) The central committee will require that the actual number of motor vehicles will decrease by a few million by 2015. They're building inter-regional ultra-high voltage DC lines (UHVDC) to carry power from areas of natural generation- wind and hydro- to areas of consumption. Their solar panel manufacturing far exceeds ours, as does their wind power.

In fact, this year China agreed to carbon targets by 2016. Overall, China is doing more than we are to reduce carbon emissions while maintaining 7-10% growth, instead of experiencing passive reduction through manufacturing collapse.

So stop obsessing about China. What about doing what WE can do... since our energy waste is so much higher. We can put more pressure on China if we're talking from an honest position, instead of our usual hypocrisy.

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Nice talk, but per CDIAC data, China is still increasing carbon emissions by around 7% a year. At that rate, by 2016, when they promise to cap their emissions, it'll be around 3 billion metric tons a year. The U.S. is holding flat or slightly decreasing, depending on who's data you use, and will be around 1.5 billion metric tons. http://cdiac.ornl.gov/CO2_Emission/timeseries/national

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And as noted before, what you gonna do about it? unless you can get China (and to a lesser extent, India) to greatly reduce carbon emissions

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Shouldn't we prepare for that, instead of trying to hold back the tide of climate change?

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Originally posted by kpo:

You say this like it's an impossible thing.

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Originally posted by kpo:
So the US is a much higher polluter per capita - the highest, in fact. There's definitely a lot the US can do. China's emissions are also more defensible in that they are on the back of economic growth that has, and is, lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty.

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You say this like it's an impossible thing. A global deal is needed, including all major economies. But the US has not signed up to such deals in the past, so people in China are India are making your exact same argument about America Geezer - 'We're not making any deal unless America signs up to it'. What's needed is some global leadership - something the US has balked at on this issue.

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Do both! And remember that it will be much cheaper to try to avert climate change NOW than to try to deal with it when it happens.

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Originally posted by kpo:
Yes China's emissions are high and projected to rise. That's one of the reasons why a global deal is urgent. The developing world reins in their emissions and the developed world cuts theirs.

No, the US keeping its emissions steady at a rate higher than everyone else is not good enough. And there is more to that fact than goodwill to fight climate change, and no guarantee that it will continue. A global deal and binding targets are what is needed. We can't have every country doing as much as it feels like to cut emissions.

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Originally posted by kpo:
For the thousandth time, it's not good enough for every country to do as much as it feels like, without signing up to any sort of binding deal.

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Any sort of deal would of course use carbon credits or some such, to put an international price on carbon and make it uneconomical to emit. This would boost green technologies and make them more affordable. And it would avert climate change at a fraction of the cost of the damage climate change would do.

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It would be in China and India's interest to have this deal - albeit not in the short term. It would be a tough sell in those two countries for that reason, and maybe they would refuse. One thing is certain: if the US doesn't sign up, those two countries won't come on board. So the first and possibly key hurdle to a deal is the US.

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:
I would like the USA to reduce it's carbon emissions by 50%, compared to 2008. It's very do-able, we just refuse to do it.

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The outgoing government in Norway has buried much-vaunted plans to capture carbon dioxide and store it underground amid mounting costs and delays.

The oil and energy ministry said the development of full-scale carbon dioxide capture at Mongstad oil refinery had been discontinued.

It said it remained committed to research into carbon capture.

When the Labour Party presented the plan in 2007, it was hailed as Norway's equivalent of a "Moon landing".

Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg and his allies lost a general election to conservatives and centrists this month, and are due to step down shortly.

Mongstad had already run into difficulties.

"At both the national and international level, the development of technologies to capture and store CO2 has taken longer, been more difficult and more costly than expected," Oil and Energy Minister Ola Borten Moe told reporters.

The process was patented back in the 1930s, and it is reckoned to be one of the most important technologies available for tackling greenhouse gas emissions.

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AFA China's emissions growing at 7% per year... considering that their economy was growing at an average of 10% per year (as high as 13%. For them, it's a "slowdown" at 7%.) they're managed to grow their economy without a proportionate increase in carbon emissions.

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