Climate Change: Be Not Afraid!

This post is adapted from a talk I recently gave to CEI’s Summer 2013 interns. I made the following points:

• “Worse than we thought” is a political mantra pretending to be a scientific finding. The state of the climate is better than they told us.
• Recent research indicates climate sensitivity is significantly lower than “consensus” science assumed. Lower sensitivity means less warming and smaller impacts.
• IPCC models project about 50% more warming than actually observed in the tropical atmosphere.
• The scariest parts of the “planetary emergency” narrative – ocean circulation shutdown triggering a new ice age, ice sheet disintegration raising sea levels 20 feet, malaria epidemics in industrialized countries, runaway warming from melting frozen methane deposits – are implausible and not supported by scientific research.
• The only card left in the alarmist deck is extreme weather.
• However, there has been no long term trend in the strength or frequency of hurricanes, tornadoes, U.S. floods or drought.
• The one exception is heat waves, but, paradoxically, the more common hot weather becomes, the more heat-related mortality declines: People adapt!
• There is no long-term trend in “normalized” extreme weather damages (losses adjusted for increases in wealth, population, and consumer price index).
•  Globally, mortality rates and aggregate mortality related to extreme weather have declined by 98% and 93%, respectively, since the 1920s.
• The state of the world keeps improving as CO2 emissions increase.

Since giving the talk, I have tweaked my Power Point presentation in hopes of making it fully referenced and self-explanatory. To view the slide show, click on Climate Change: Be Not Afraid!