Secretary Clinton's Climate Con
Investor's Business Daily
Posted 08/23/2010 07:10 PM ET
Junk Science: Our secretary of state tells the world the devastating Pakistani floods are caused by man-made global warming as the U.N. plans to exploit the crisis to restart stalled climate talks. Repent, the end is near.
In an interview with Anwar Iqbal of Pakistan's Dawn TV posted on the State Department's Web site, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, while discussing the Pakistani floods and American relief efforts, gratuitously said "having gone through Katrina and seeing what's happening around the world with the increase in the number of natural disasters and the extent of the damage that they're causing ... some people believe (they are) linked to global climate change."
When asked if this was her belief, Mrs. Clinton responded: "I think that there is a linkage. You can't point to any particular disaster and say, 'It was caused by ... .' But we are changing the climate of the world; we've seen that with the Russian forest fires ... ."
Pressed as to whether she thought there was a link between the Russian fires and the flood in Pakistan, Clinton, channeling Al Gore, said: "Not a direct link. But when you have the changes in climate that affect weather that we're now seeing, I think the predictions of more natural disasters are unfortunately being played out."
Well, not exactly, according to Indur M. Goklany, a member of the Global Warming Policy Foundation Academic Advisory Council and a researcher who's been associated with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change since its inception in 1988. Extreme weather events, he has found, have had a minor and declining role in global public health and deaths and death rates.
Based on 2000-08 data, extreme weather events are responsible for about 0.05% of all global deaths (31,700 deaths vs. 58.8 million, annually). That is, despite the media attention to such events, extreme weather has a minor impact on global public health.
Goklany reports: "Long term (1900-2008) data show that average annual deaths and death rates from all such events declined by 93% and 98%, respectively, since cresting in the 1920s." Deaths and death rates from droughts also peaked in the 1930s, declining by 99.97% and 99.99%, respectively. For floods, deaths and death rates have declined by 98.7% to 99.6% since the 1930s.
In our current 24-hour news cycle, perception becomes reality. Storms have seemed to get worse and more frequent as populations have increased and, particularly in the U.S., migrated to vulnerable coastal areas and flood plains.
Noted climatologist Roger Pielke Jr. finds that once damage from hurricanes is normalized for changes in population and other demographic factors, there is no long-term change in the amount of destruction they are causing.
As Stanley Goldenberg, a meteorologist at the Hurricane Research Division of the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), states: "I speak for many hurricane climate researchers in saying such claims are nonsense."
Goldenberg observes that "Katrina is part of a well-documented multidecadal scale fluctuation in hurricane activity," adding, "this cycle was described in a heavily cited article printed in the journal science in 2001."
Goldenberg's colleague at NOAA, Dr. Chris Landsea, agrees. "If you look at the raw hurricane data itself," he said, "there is no global warming signal. What we see instead is a strong cycling of activity. There are periods of 25 to 40 years where it's very busy and then periods of 25 to 40 years when it's very quiet."
Not letting a weather-related crisis go to waste, however, the New York Times reports that Pakistan's foreign minister, Makhdoom Shah Mahmood Qureshi, and U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon "hinted that they would use the Pakistan crisis to spur the now-stalled international climate talks."
As for the Russian fires, a list of the top-10 killers compiled by the folks at Juggle.com shows no link between increasing CO2 levels and fire deaths. Correlation is not causality, and weather is not climate change. Secretary Clinton should stick to putting out foreign policy fires.
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