"Little Evidence for Link between Natural Disasters and Global Warming"

Source:

https://www.scienceunderattack.com/blog/2021/5/3/little-evidence-for-link-between-natural-disasters-and-global-warming-76

"The UNDRR-CRED report draws a strong link between global warming and extreme weather events, citing a “staggering rise in climate-related disasters over the last twenty years.”

But, as shown in the figure above, the total number of climate-related disasters in fact exhibits a distinctly declining trend (in red) since 2000, falling by 11% over the last 21 years.

This completely contradicts the claims in two different sections of the report that the annual number of disasters since 2000 has either risen significantly from before or been “relatively stable.”

Another blatant inconsistency in the UNDRR-CRED report, an inconsistency that bolsters its false claim of a rising disaster rate, is a comparison between the period from 2000 to 2019 and the preceding 20 years from 1980 to 1999.

The report contends that the earlier 20 years saw only 4,212 disasters, compared with 7,348 during the later period.      

However, the University of Colorado’s Roger Pielke Jr., who studies natural disasters, says that the report’s numbers are flawed.

As CRED has repeatedly acknowledged, data from 20th-century disasters are unreliable because disasters were reported differently before the Internet existed.

Climate writer Paul Homewood has noted a sudden jump in the annual number of disasters listed in CRED’s EM-DAT (Emergency Events Database) after 1998, which the agency itself attributes to increased disaster reporting in the Internet era.

So its claim that the number of disasters over 20 years jumped from 4,212 to 7,348 is meaningless.

The IFRC report reaches the same erroneous conclusions as the CRED-UNDRR report – not surprisingly, since they are both based on CRED’s EM-DAT.

As seen in the next figure, which is the same as the Red Cross report’s Figure 1.1, climate- and weather-related disasters since 2000 have declined by approximately the same 11% noted above.

The report’s misleading assertion that such disasters have risen almost 35% since the 1990s relies on the same failure to account for a major increase in disaster reporting since 1998 due to the arrival of the Internet."