The Video Collage of Climate Change
Tell me. Is there a year when a well funded camera crew could not venture out to cover heat waves, droughts, floods, hurricanes, forest fires and tornadoes wreaking havoc in some part of the world? Would there ever have been a year when their video collage of Mother Nature’s devastation would be empty?
The difference between now and the past is the presence of cameras everywhere and there are people quick to record the unwelcome weather antics of reality. It may seem like more because there are more of us with more stuff to get in the way of extreme weather.
But would the camera crew recording calamity know where to be ahead of time? That level of prediction is not yet in our toolbox. Our modern transportation allows us to reach a breach in calm weather very quickly so as not to miss the mess. But we can’t predict it ahead of time.
The video collage of bad weather will convince some that the climate is changing for the worse but it says nothing about the cause. After each disaster in the video collage it will be pointed out that this type of weather is ‘consistent with climate change’. That statement is meant to plant the idea that CO2 is the cause because CO2 has been rising in the atmosphere and climatologists can’t think of anything else that might be causing the changes.
But it was also consistent with climate change a century ago when CO2 was lower than it is now. Extreme weather does not care how much CO2 is in the air.
The US has been enjoying an absence of major(cat 3-5) hurricanes making landfall over the last ten years even as CO2 continues to increase unabated in the atmosphere. Hurricanes don’t care how much CO2 is in the air. This should be enough to convince you that they happen for other reasons. We are told that as CO2 increases we will see hurricanes more frequently and they will become more intense. The world’s second biggest emitter of CO2 is making a mockery of that claim.
And so it is with other instances of extreme weather.
Summer Heat Waves - more CO2 lessens their effect
Mother Nature supports those who claim natural variability controls extreme weather NOT human emissions of CO2. In almost all instances of extreme weather the data show that it was worse in the past when CO2 was at lower levels in the atmosphere.
A video collage is an emotional appeal to human empathy meant to dull the critical faculties of the audience. An annual video collage of extreme weather details the devastation and power of Mother Nature but it does not tell us the cause or the trend. For that information we must rely on dispassionate scientific measurement.
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