by Don Boudreaux in Cafehayek on May 24, 2011
Writing in today’s Washington Post, Bill McKibben blames deadly recent weather events on climate change. And he snarkily dismisses as naive the argument that humankind can adapt well to such change.
Let’s look at data from the National Weather Service on annual fatalities in the U.S. caused by tornados, floods, and hurricanes from 1940 through 2009. Naturally, these data show that the number of such fatalities varies from year to year. For example, in 1972 the number of persons killed by these weather events was 703 while in 1988 the number was 72. On average, however, the trend is clear and encouraging: the number of such fatalities, especially since 1980, is declining.
The average annual number of such fatalities over this entire 70-year span is 248. In each of the four decades prior to 1980, the average annual number of fatalities was higher than 248; in particular:
1940-49: 272
1950-59: 308
1960-69: 282
1970-79: 296
The average annual number of such fatalities over the full 40 years 1940-1979 was 290.
But in each of the three decades starting in 1980, the average annual number of fatalities caused by tornados, floods, and hurricanes was lower than 248; in particular:
1980-89: 173
1990-99: 171
2000-09: 238
The average annual number of such fatalities over the full 30 years 1980-2009 was 194. (This number falls to 160 - just over half of the 1940-79 number of 290 - if we exclude the deaths attributed to hurricane Katrina, the great majority of which were caused by a levee that breached a day after the storm passed.)
This decline in the absolute number of deaths caused by tornados, floods, and hurricanes is even more impressive considering that U.S. population more than doubled over these 70 years, from 132 million in 1940 to 308 million today.
Seems that McKibben’s apocalyptic prognostications about humanity’s future are as fact-based as are those of the Rev. Harold Camping.
Enlarged.
From Goklany. Global Death and Death Rates Due to Extreme Weather Events, 1900-2008. Source: Goklany (2009), based on EM-DAT (2009), McEvedy and Jones (1978), and WRI (2009).
See also this post Putting humanity in a Kangaroo Court. You may not have noticed, but last week you were a co-defendant in a court case. In Stockholm, the Third Nobel Laureate Symposium on Global Sustainability met at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. The event website proclaimed that ‘humanity [sic] will be on trial as the Third Nobel Laureate Symposium brings together almost 20 Nobel Laureates, a number of leading policy makers and some of the world’s most renowned thinkers and experts on global sustainability.’
The charge against us, humanity, was that ‘our vast imprint on the planet’s environment has shifted the Earth into a new geological period labelled the “Anthropocene” - the Age of Man’. But this was a showtrial. The guilty verdict had been written before the court had even assembled. ‘The prosecution will therefore maintain that humanity must work towards global stewardship around the planet’s intrinsic boundaries, a scientifically defined space within which we can continue to develop’, claimed Professor Will Steffen, showtrial ‘prosecutor’and executive director of the Climate Change Institute at the Australian National University. The website and literature accompanying the symposium made no mention of the defence’s argument. Indeed, why would a Symposium on Global Sustainability invite a defence that challenged the premises it intended to promote?
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Wednesday, May 25, 2011
Contacts:
Christopher Horner, chris.horner@atinstitute.org
Paul Chesser, paul.chesser@atinstitute.org
MANASSAS, Va. - On Tuesday, more than four months after the American Tradition Institute’s Environmental Law Center requested emails and other files from a specifically identified University of Virginia back-up computer, the University was hauled into court and made to stand and agree to comply with the Commonwealth’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).
Under Virginia’s FOIA, ATI and co-petitioner Delegate Bob Marshall (R-Manassas) asked UVA to disgorge the emails and files that Virginia’s Attorney General also sought under other authority. The emails are specific communications sent and received by Dr, Michael Mann during his tenure at UVA in which he corresponded with, or discussed other, leading voices that represent the climate alarmist perspective. Seminal among them include discussions about his now infamous and discredited 1,000-year temperature reconstruction known as the “hockey stick.” There also already appears - from records ATI has received - to be additional information of the kind released in the “Climategate” emails that originated at the Climatic Research Unit at East Anglia University.
Under FOIA the University was required to produce the documents within five days of its receipt of payment for “accessing, duplicating, supplying or searching” for the documents. Alternatively they could have entered into an agreement with ATI on when they would supply the documents, or they could have gone to court to ask for more time. They did none of the above. Instead they promised to provide some of the documents “shortly” on April 6; then specifically on May 6, 2011; and always stated they would get to the others later on. They did none of this either, so ATI went to court to compel production and compliance with the law.
ATI finally received the first approximately 20 percent of the 9,000 pages of documents that UVA says are responsive to ATI’s request and that it possesses, only after ATI filed itspetition
The failure of UVA to honor its own commitments or to follow the law forced ATI to petition the court ( http://tinyurl.com/3blfohb ) for relief. ATI filed its petition on May 16th, and the Court heard the matter Tuesday.
It took a petition to force UVA to agree to produce the documents that by statute they should already have produced. The day before the court hearing, UVA finally agreed to a date when they must produce all the documents they believe are not protected from disclosure. The court entered an order (PDF) that forces UVA to honor that agreement and to produce the documents in easy-to-read electronic form so that ATI can make them available to all who wish to review the work of this highly controversial former Virginia employee. They must produce those documents by August 22nd.
In addition ATI has won the right to look at all the documents beginning no later than September 21, including those the University refuses to make public. The court issued a protective order that allows ATI’s attorneys, David Schnare and Christopher Horner, to see them all so that they can challenge any further UVA refusals to supply what the public paid for. The records constitute a history of the “hockey stick” and the activities of Michael Mann, who also during the relevant time served on, e.g., the UN’s IPCC, all of which have been the subject of intense scrutiny.
“By the end of this year, ATI and UVA will obtain judicial review of the University’s obligation to fulfill the public’s right to know how taxpayer-funded employees use the taxpayer’s resources,” said Mr. Horner, director of litigation at ATI’s Environmental Law Center. “The court will determine whether this can be hidden behind the ivy covered walls of our public colleges and universities under a non-existent FOIA exemption of ‘academic freedom,’ which Virginia’s legislature has never recognized.”
ATI also put a final issue before the court. Under the Virginia FOIA, UVA is not allowed to impose fees on ATI to recoup the general costs of creating or maintaining records, or of transacting the general business of the University. The University has already admitted that it must obey several laws in fulfillment of its duty to protect some of its records, such as medical files and student information. This is part of the business of the University, just as any governmental body must protect its sensitive records. UVA, however, demanded that ATI pay $8,500 to offset UVA’s costs of doing precisely this regular business, which must be performed when releasing any information, under any authority. ATI argued, and existing case law indicates, this is simply not allowed. The University disagreed, and the court will issue its opinion on that matter on June 15th. ICECAP NOTE: This despite the UVA administration spending $500,000 on legal fees to try and block adherence to FOIA from ATI even after they obliged Greenpeace with Pat Michaels files without challenge or cost.
“ATI pursues important public issues,” said Dr. Schnare, director of ATI’s Environmental Law Center. “This case is about whether the government can put up a pay wall to frustrate the public’s right to transparency. If it can, the public can’t hold government employees to the high standards of conduct they should meet.”
See Prince William County (Va.) Court’s Order to Produce Documents in ATI Environmental Law Center’s Freedom of Information Act case against the University of Virginia ( http://www.atinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/ATI-v-UVA-5-24-Production-Order.pdf ).
See Prince William County (Va.) Court’s Order on Protection of Documents in ATI Environmental Law Center’s Freedom of Information Act case against the University of Virginia ( http://www.atinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/ATI-v-UVA-5-24-Protective-Order.pdf ).
For an interview with American Tradition Institute senior director of litigation Christopher Horner, email chris.horner@atinstitute.org or call (202)670-2680.
By Darren Samuelsohn, Politico
Climate scientists are in a tough spot.
They have never been more certain about what they know. Powerful new satellites can hone in on mountainous regions to measure ice melt. Stronger computers model changes in disruptive weather patterns. Scientists are even more comfortable attributing climate change to visible effects around the globe, from retreating Himalayan glaciers to southwestern U.S. droughts and acidifying oceans.
Yet scientists are still stuck in the mud trying to get that message out in Washington, where House Republicans made one of their first orders of business passing legislation to zero out research budgets for domestic and international climate efforts and unraveling a key EPA declaration that humans have played a critical role in changing the planet.
For instance, National Research Council members got a collective shrug earlier this month when they went up to Capitol Hill to share their work - a congressionally mandated, 18-month review of the nuts and bolts of global warming science and ideas for what U.S. policymakers could do about it.
Only a small group of House and Senate aides showed up for private briefings on the study. And while a couple of staffers asked parochial questions about how climate change affects their districts and states, the authors also got the second degree on whether there is even a problem.
“They said, ‘There are those who believe it’s a bit of hogwash. And not only hogwash, but a fraud,’” said Albert Carnesale, the chancellor emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles and chairman of the NRC panel.
“Scientists aren’t a lobbying force,” said Andrew Revkin, author of The New York Times Dot Earth blog. “They’re trying to make science matter in an arena where the only way it matters is to use it to support an existing agenda.”
Carnesale said he hopes the NRC report can help prod U.S. lawmakers to curb emissions and prepare for changes that are already being locked in. But he acknowledged the challenge is to get policymakers to at least accept there are risks associated with doing nothing.
“For people for whom this is a matter of ideology or faith, there’s no argument that’s going to convince them,” he said.
Princeton University mechanical engineering professor Robert Socolow said climate scientists are disadvantaged because they’re trying to engage the public with an issue that essentially sounds like a bummer.
The NRC and the university opportunists are a collective embarrassment to what was once a great science when giants like Landsberg, Namias, and Lamb were the voices heard. These modern clowns are saying what they feel is neceassry to support their grant gravy train and their own political agendas. The republicans and democrats who are resisting attempts to enact further green agenda actions are the heroes not the villians in this drama. With every passing season, nature is making it patently obvious the NRC, the green enviro extremists and the alarmist scientists’ theories and predictions and claims by the useful idiots like Samiuelsohn are totally void of validity. Don’t be fooled that you are not paying already as the president promised “...there is more one way to skin this cat’. Many states are already involved heavily in cap and tax schemes and the EPA threatens to rachet it up several notches. The restrictions on drilling and heavy subsidization of unreliable renewable alternatives is why we experience so much pain at the pump. Speculators would short the market and prices would plunge if our government allowed full exploiting our own world leading oil and gas resources. These high prices affect the poor and middle class most.