Guest Post: Catastrophic Gullibility
A guest post by Owen Jennings:
Climate change is big business in New Zealand. Government and local authorities now have a small army of people employed in the climate change industry paid by our taxes and rates. An even bigger army work as consultants where the pay is better. Its an industry with massive ‘oil tanker’ impetus.
Most of their work is predicated on the claim that things are getting worse. Higher temperatures are driving the climate into chaos. Weather events have already become more extreme and will get a heap worse.
But is this assumption true? Do the facts support the chaos, ‘everything-is-getting-worse’ claim?
Is New Zealand experiencing deteriorating weather as a result of rising temperatures? There are countless MSM articles, scientific papers, regular statements by people who ought to know supporting the proposition and the country is investing millions in mitigation and defensive projects.
Unsurprisingly, not everyone buys into the popular line. A helpful contact of mine found a very thorough study that mysteriously received no coverage here but disputes the claim of everything-has-already-got-worse angle. You can read it at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17477891.2021.1905595
It is an intensive study of insurance losses from 1968 to 2019, normalised to ensure we are looking at data that is adjusted for the passage of time. ‘Normalisation is a standard device employed in such studies. Here is their conclusion……..
“A key result emerging from our study is that normalised seasonal losses due to extreme weather show no statistically significant trend over time. In other words, once we control the loss data for factors that we know to have changed, we see no residual trend that needs explaining by anthropogenic climate change, or any other cause for that matter”.
This conclusion accords with world-wide work done by Dr Roger Pielke. He points out that a study carried out by Munich Re, a large re-insurance company based in Germany and published by The Lancet showed as the world has become wealthier, the fraction of that wealth that is destroyed by extreme weather has gone down. This trend holds for rich and poor nations, and remarkably across all types of weather phenomena. It also helps us to understand why the focus on extreme weather among climate advocates is badly misguided.
Pielke keeps detailed information on all of the main weather events – cyclones, hurricanes, floods, droughts, wild fires, etc and he shows no negative trends. In fact, many show a positive trend. In a recent published paper he concluded, “since 1990 both overall and weather/climate losses have decreased as proportion of global GDP”.
The findings of the IPCC and the World Met Office are in general agreement with no obvious changes in weather patterns except for relatively minor changes in rainfall and drought conditions in limited areas. That does not prevent them from continuing, year after year running predictions of calamitous changes about to descend upon us.
The insurance industry findings are compelling. Any chance they could justify bolstering premiums would be taken by both hands. They simply cannot find any trends on which to hang their collective hats.
So, why are we bombarded daily with stories of on-going calamity? Its easy. Follow the money. Too many jobs, too many research grants, too many scary, sensational stories that sell advertising are dependent on keeping the catastrophic theme alive and well.
Are we a gullible lot or what?