Climate Change: Natural Disasters

Post #996

NOTE: A related report was posted here.

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Al Gore only had the 2001 IPCC report at his disposal when he created the 2006 film, An Inconvenient Truth. If that is all of the data that you had, then you might be tempted to say that climate change derived from increased CO2 causes an increase in extreme weather events and other natural disasters such as flooding and drought:

Restricted to data up to 2001, the extra 46 parts per million (ppm) in atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) really does seem like it might have been causing the increasing rate of natural disasters. But as the prior report shows, making bold claims based on less than 50 years of continuous data is hazardous — as you are likely to be wrong.

When years after 2001 get added, you find the relation of CO2 to natural disasters “breaks down”:

The 50 ppm CO2 which have been added since 2001 (yellow marks) did not have the same effect on natural disasters as the 46 ppm CO2 had had up until 2001. If a 46 ppm increase does “big things,” but a 50 ppm increase does “nothing” — then what gives?

A likely explanation for the rising red diamonds at lower left is that technology advances and inter-connectedness were increasing the reporting rate of natural disasters, up until the point where all of them were being captured and recorded. After all natural disasters on Earth were being recorded, the count stopped rising.

To find out if there is evidence of a relation between two things, you can find the correlation coefficient, r. Regardless of the discipline that you are in, there is a minimum value of r that is required in order to claim evidence of minimal correlation:

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NOTE:
To go from r to r-squared, you multiply r by itself.
When r = 0.1, then r-squared = (0.1 * 0.1) = 0.01.
To go backward from r-square back to r, you take the square root.

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When using a standard that is universally-agreed upon (r must be at least 0.1; r-squared must be at least 0.01), and then applying that universal standard to the evidence of a link between the CO2 increases after 2001, and the natural disasters after 2001, you do not even find evidence of a “weak correlation”:

Evidence suggests that the film, An Inconvenient Truth, got it wrong. Atmospheric CO2 isn’t anywhere near as dangerous as the film would have you believe. Recent jumps of 50 ppm in CO2 do not even have a detectable effect on things like extreme weather and natural disasters.

Like COVID, climate alarmism appears to be an elaborate scam which was intentionally devised in order to sell questionable products — e.g., masks and “vaccines” (for COVID); windmills, solar panels and electric cars (for climate change) — and also to control the populations of Earth.

Both scams fall apart when you apply universally-valid standards to evaluate them.

Reference

[longest-running dataset for atmospheric CO2] — NOAA. https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/data.html

[weather events on Earth] — OWID. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/natural-disasters-by-type

[evidence of correlation] — Akoglu H. User's guide to correlation coefficients. Turk J Emerg Med. 2018 Aug 7;18(3):91-93. doi: 10.1016/j.tjem.2018.08.001. PMID: 30191186; PMCID: PMC6107969. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6107969/