By Simon Sturdee, AFP
Natural disasters killed over 220,000 people in 2008, making it one of the most devastating years on record and underlining the need for a global climate deal, the world’s number two reinsurer said Monday. What I find particularly funny is, the article talks mostly about non-global warming caused disasters. For instance, 70,000 of those deaths were caused by an earthquake in China: Just days later an earthquake shook China’s Sichuan province, leaving 70,000 dead, 18,000 missing and almost five million homeless, according to official figures, Munich Re said.
He then talks about how COLD weather caused 1000 deaths in Afghanistan. Ya know I looked and looked, but I just couldn’t find where in the dictionary a “cold snap” was listed as a natural disaster:Around 1,000 people died in a severe cold snap in January in Afghanistan, Kyrgystan and Tajikistan, while 635 perished in August and September in floods in India, Nepal and Bangladesh.
He also admits that there were less natural disasters this year, than in 2007:Although the number of natural disasters was lower than in 2007, the catastrophes that occurred proved to be more destructive in terms of the number of victims and the financial cost of the damage caused, Germany-based Munich Re said in its annual assessment.
Furthermore, he works under the broad assumption that every one agrees with the legitimacy of global warming, and therefore, he doesn’t once try and make any sort of scientific or even logical link between natural disasters and global warming. He simply states that they are caused by increased pollution and global warming. Yep, another article by the MSM about how we are all going to die if we don’t avert global warming, by making our own compost piles, recycling fingernail clippings, and buying Al Gore’s DVDs. There are a lot of people out there, even some close to me, that claim all of this extreme weather is the result of global warming. Problem is, the evidence doesn’t support the claim that the natural disaster death’s of ‘08 are the result of global warming, or that increased global temperature leads to extreme weather patterns and disasters. In fact, sometimes it is the opposite, and has been more historically tied to El Nino, El Nina, and other fluctuating water currents. Hurricanes ‘are not caused by global warming’
Rising temperatures may actually reduce the number of hurricanes in the Atlantic, Tom Knutson claims in a new study. Dr Knutson’s change of heart has reignited the debate in the US about how closely hurricanes can be tied to global warming......Dr Knutson’s study, which is based on computer models, predicts that hurricanes will become less common, but more destructive, by the end of this century.They are also likely to be accompanied by much heavier downpours of rain. Dr. Knutson and colleagues from the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) at Princeton, New Jersey, ran computer replays of each August to October hurricane season between 1980 and 2006. The simulations were then repeated to show what would happen if ocean and atmospheric conditions were altered by expected levels of global warming. The “warm climate” runs generated 27 per cent fewer tropical storms and 18 per cent fewer hurricanes. The team concluded that the recent jump in hurricane frequency was caused not by high temperatures in the Atlantic, but by differences in temperatures between oceans. Uniform warming of all ocean basins does not generate more hurricanes, they found.
Graph produced by GlobalWarmingHoax.com with data from NOAA
Well what about tornadoes you ask? The deadliest tornado decade since 1930 was the decade of the 1930’s. Tornado deaths have fallen every decade since 1930 up until the 1970’s when they increased about 5% over the previous decade. The 1970’s were also one of the cooler decades this century with below average temperatures and there isn’t any clear correlation between strong tornadoes and climate temperature. Every decade after the 1970’s have seen the number of tornado deaths fall.
Well what about lightning and floods? Actually both lightning and flood deaths are way down from their highs… Sorry. Looks like the claim that global warming is causing more natural disaster deaths is a bunch of crap. Thanks to globalwarminghoax.com for some of the graphs. Read more here.
By Bill Wichert, Express Times
The rear end of a cow could become the next source of financial hardship for farmers. Facing lower milk prices and higher operational costs, dairy farmers in New Jersey and Pennsylvania say they couldn’t afford the so-called cow tax, a suggestion made by federal officials to charge permit fees for livestock as a way of regulating greenhouse gas emissions.
“It’s just another expense a farmer doesn’t need,” said Layne Klein, whose family has been running a dairy farm for 73 years in Forks Township. “I guess you’d call it one more nail in the coffin.” The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency raised the concept in a recent report on possible greenhouse gas regulations under the Clean Air Act. Those regulations also could be extended to small businesses, schools, hospitals and churches.
In its comments on the EPA proposal, the U.S. Department of Agriculture said the regulations might force permitting requirements on dairy farms with more than 25 cows, beef cattle operations with more than 50 cattle, swine facilities with more than 200 hogs and farms with 500 or more acres of corn. The permit costs would mean $175 per dairy cow, $87.50 a head for beef cattle and $20 per hog, according to Liz Thompson, a research associate with the New Jersey Farm Bureau. A herd of 75 dairy cows would carry a price tag of about $13,000.
“It’s almost incredulity,” said Thompson, describing the reaction of some farmers. “‘What, are you kidding me?’” While there is not a formal proposal on instituting such a tax—doing so would take years to implement—the agriculture community has to be part of discussions about emissions regulations and climate change, EPA spokesman Jonathan Shradar said.
In 2006, agricultural sources accounted for 6.4 percent of greenhouse gas emissions nationwide, according to the EPA. One greenhouse gas, methane, can be converted into power when it comes from landfills, but the version coming off farms does not have the same second life, Shradar said. “We don’t know how to harness the rear end of a cow just yet for power generation,” he said.
The proposed regulations, however, could put farmers out of business, some say. For Warren County farmer Frank Gibbs, he and his sons would face up to $35,000 in permit fees to cover the roughly 200 cows on their 550-acre Allamuchy Township farm. His family has been farming the land since the late 1800s. “There’s no way,” Gibbs said. “That’s the end of the dairy business.” Read more here.
By Christopher Booker, UK Telegraph
The first, on May 21, headed “Climate change threat to Alpine ski resorts” , reported that the entire Alpine “winter sports industry” could soon “grind to a halt for lack of snow”. The second, on December 19, headed “The Alps have best snow conditions in a generation” , reported that this winter’s Alpine snowfalls “look set to beat all records by New Year’s Day”. Easily one of the most important stories of 2008 has been all the evidence suggesting that this may be looked back on as the year when there was a turning point in the great worldwide panic over man-made global warming. Just when politicians in Europe and America have been adopting the most costly and damaging measures politicians have ever proposed, to combat this supposed menace, the tide has turned in three significant respects.
First, all over the world, temperatures have been dropping in a way wholly unpredicted by all those computer models which have been used as the main drivers of the scare. Last winter, as temperatures plummeted, many parts of the world had snowfalls on a scale not seen for decades. This winter, with the whole of Canada and half the US under snow, looks likely to be even worse. After several years flatlining, global temperatures have dropped sharply enough to cancel out much of their net rise in the 20th century.
Ever shriller and more frantic has become the insistence of the warmists, cheered on by their army of media groupies such as the BBC, that the last 10 years have been the “hottest in history” and that the North Pole would soon be ice-free – as the poles remain defiantly icebound and those polar bears fail to drown. All those hysterical predictions that we are seeing more droughts and hurricanes than ever before have infuriatingly failed to materialise.
Even the more cautious scientific acolytes of the official orthodoxy now admit that, thanks to “natural factors” such as ocean currents, temperatures have failed to rise as predicted (although they plaintively assure us that this cooling effect is merely “masking the underlying warming trend”, and that the temperature rise will resume worse than ever by the middle of the next decade).
Secondly, 2008 was the year when any pretence that there was a “scientific consensus” in favour of man-made global warming collapsed. At long last, as in the Manhattan Declaration last March, hundreds of proper scientists, including many of the world’s most eminent climate experts, have been rallying to pour scorn on that “consensus” which was only a politically engineered artefact, based on ever more blatantly manipulated data and computer models programmed to produce no more than convenient fictions.
Thirdly, as banks collapsed and the global economy plunged into its worst recession for decades, harsh reality at last began to break in on those self-deluding dreams which have for so long possessed almost every politician in the western world. As we saw in this month’s Poznan conference, when 10,000 politicians, officials and “environmentalists” gathered to plan next year’s “son of Kyoto” treaty in Copenhagen, panicking politicians are waking up to the fact that the world can no longer afford all those quixotic schemes for “combating climate change” with which they were so happy to indulge themselves in more comfortable times. Read more here
See larger image here.
