On Thursday, Pope Francis appeared before Congress urging the legislators to take action on a number of fronts, including "climate change," i.e. anthropogenic global warming. In June, Pope Francis
released an Encyclical discussing a number of issues, theological and political, which included this statement:
A very solid scientific consensus indicates that we are presently witnessing a disturbing
warming of the climatic system. In recent decades this warming has been accompanied by a constant rise in the sea level and, it would appear, by an increase of extreme weather events, even if a scientifically determinable cause cannot be assigned to each particular phenomenon. Humanity is called to recognize the need for changes of lifestyle, production and consumption, in order to combat this warming or at least the human causes which produce or aggravate it.
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Pope Francis |
If you read the statement closely you will see "and, it would appear" inserted before the declaration there has been "an increase of extreme weather events." It would have been easy to leave out the "and, it would appear." Undoubtedly the reason to include that qualifier, which doesn't attach to any other assertion in the statement, is a recognition that there is no solid evidence to support the claim of increased extreme weather. When it comes to this claim, alarmists inevitably resort to anecdotes in lieu of statistical information. And for good reason - statistical information doesn't show an increase in extreme weather.
HURRICANES
First up is CNSNews
reporting on the continued hurricane drought:
Category 3 or above, have struck the continental U.S. in a record-breaking 119 months, according to hurricane data kept by the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Hurricane Research Division (HRC) dating back to 1851.
Last year, President Obama warned that hurricanes will become “more common and more devastating” because of climate change.
But Obama is now the longest serving president (since the 1851 start of NOAA's data) not to see a major hurricane strike the U.S. during his time in office. He is also the first president since Benjamin Harrison was in office 122 years ago to have no major hurricane strike during his term.
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The previous record was an eight-year span during the 1860's in which no major hurricanes struck the U.S.
The current hurricane drought is “a rare event” that is “unprecedented in the historical record,” according to Timothy Hall, a hurricane researcher at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
Hall also said there is only a 39 percent chance that the current hurricane drought will end next year.
MORE ON HURRICANES
A study by Thomas R. Knutson, a research meteorologist at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, found no increase in hurricane activity over the past 100 years. The study, titled "\"Global Warming and Hurricanes: An Overview of Current Research Results," was written in 2008 and updated on November 28, 2012. It sought to answer the question "Has Global Warming Affected Atlantic Hurricane Activity?"
To his credit, Knutson, a fervent supporter of anthropogenic global warming theory, reported honestly on what he found: "the historical tropical storm count record does not provide compelling
evidence for a substantial greenhouse warming induced long-term increase."
Not to his credit, Knutson completely ignored his own exhaustive study to make a conclusory statement reasserting his hypothesis proven wrong by his own study:
"climate warming will cause hurricanes in the coming century to be more intense globally and to have higher rainfall rates than present-day hurricanes. In my view, there are better than even odds that the numbers of very intense (category 4 and 5) hurricanes will increase by a substantial fraction in some basins, while it is likely that the annual number of tropical storms globally will either decrease or remain essentially unchanged."
Knutson undoubtedly knows how the media operates. If reporters stumble across his study, they could well report his conclusory statement instead of the results of the study proving that conclusory statement is wrong.
TORNADOES
The website
www.ustornadoes.com reports on tornadoes that hit the United States. Earlier this week, the website
reported on the almost complete lack of tornadoes in 2015:
The 2015 tornado year might best be described as confused. It hasn’t been a full-time dud. The most active period brought a lot of tornadoes, and it came about when it should have.
However, like recent years, the oddities tend to outweigh normalcy. This year, one prominent story is the lack of big-time tornadoes. The one and only EF4+, those rated violent on the tornado scale, occurred way back in April.
Such tallies threaten a tie for the least number of violent tornadoes on record. And if you add in the much more numerous but still quite intense EF3 tornadoes, we find the story of 2015’s powerful tornado drought is an even deeper one.
As the year got going it seemed it was ready to continue the quiet streak we’ve seen since 2012 in particular.
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The summer tornado season is rarely terribly impressive, but this one was not memorable in the least. Tornado numbers relative to average again grew further apart after coming together in April-June.
Throughout the ups and downs, there has been one great lacking: intense to violent tornadoes. As of publication, only 12 verified EF3 tornadoes have touched down and only one verified EF4 has occurred. This is as low as it gets.
Pope Francis urges action on "climate change" to address more extreme weather that isn't happening. Ironically the people who are hurt the most by measures to combat carbon emissions, measures which would lead to much higher energy costs, are the very poor that Pope says he is speaking out to help.
See also:
Wednesday, February 25, 2015, Alarmists Continue to Use Weather as Proof of Anthropogenic Global Warming
Monday, September 15, 2014, Tornadoes and the Myth of an Increase in Extreme Weather
Tuesday, May 21, 2013, Mythbuster: Hurricanes and Tornadoes are Not Increasing in Number or Frequency