The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has released its Special Report on Extremes, which fails to find increasing property damage caused by global warming. The report also addresses property damage trends for particular types of extreme weather events, finding no link between trends in tornado damages and global warming, and no link between flood damages and global warming.
The following statements from environment experts at The Heartland Institute – a free-market think tank – may be used for attribution. For more comments, refer to the contact information below. To book a Heartland guest on your program, please contact Tammy Nash at [email protected] and 312/377-4000. After regular business hours, contact Jim Lakely at [email protected] and 312/731-9364.
“Claims by global warming alarmists that global warming is causing more extreme weather events are highly speculative and refuted by sound science. IPCC is notorious for exaggerating the claimed impacts of global warming, yet even IPCC cannot find any link between global warming and property damage. This supports objective data showing no increase in hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts, floods, or other extreme weather events as our planet has moderately and beneficially warmed.”
James M. Taylor
Senior fellow for Environmental Policy
The Heartland Institute
[email protected]
941/776-5690
“Extreme weather has been occurring in the Earth’s climate for hundreds of years. It is an inherent part of the Earth’s climate system.
“In a comprehensive paper on the global warming debate, published in 2005 in Pure & Applied Geophysics, my co-authors (Tad Murty, P Chittibabu) and I concluded that ‘the link between extreme weather and global warming is more a perception than reality. This perception is being fostered due to frequent media reports of world-wide extreme weather today.’
“A careful analysis suggests that extreme weather events are about the same today as in the 1960s and 1970s, when the Earth’s mean temperature was declining. In fact some of the extreme weather events like winter blizzards on the Canadian Prairies have declined in frequency in the last forty years. Also, tornado count on the Canadian-American Prairies has declined today, when compared to the Dust Bowl years of the 1920s and 1930s.
“Elsewhere, there is no evidence of increasing extreme weather events anywhere. In the monsoonal climate of India and south Asia, droughts and floods have been occurring irregularly with no increasing/decreasing trend as evidenced in a 200-year-long excellent data set. Worldwide tropical cyclone and hurricane activity appears to be on the decline in the last two years or so. Interestingly, cold weather extremes appear to be on the rise in Europe and North America in recent years, for which no explanation is offered by climate modelers.”
Madhav Khandekar
IPCC Reviewer (2007)
Policy Advisor, Environment
The Heartland Institute
[email protected]
403/547-7272
The Heartland Institute is a 28-year-old national nonprofit organization with offices in Chicago, Illinois and Washington, DC. Its mission is to discover, develop, and promote free-market solutions to social and economic problems. For more information, visit our Web site or call 312/377-4000.
