January 12, 2005
by Dennis T. Avery
I recently was warned that the eco-movement would blame the tsunami disaster on global warming. I laughed. How could they blame an earthquake event that hits the region about once every 200 years on modern CO2 emissions?
I didn't have long to wonder. The very next day, Stephen Tindale, executive director of Greenpeace UK, told an interviewer, "No one can ignore the relentless increase in extreme weather events and so-called natural disasters, which in reality are no more natural than a plastic Christmas tree."
The last transoceanic tsunami in Southeast Asia occurred in 1883, after the Indonesian volcano Krakatoa blew up. The resulting killer wave drowned 36,000 people, while darkened skies lowered world temperatures for five years. But no one blamed the eruption of Krakatoa on humans burning coal oil lamps.
Greenpeace's "relentless increase in extreme weather events" has never happened. "Storminess" in North America has been declining for the past 50 years-not despite warmer temperatures, but because of them. The numbers of hurricanes, "thunder days," hailstorms, East Coast storms, and Canadian blizzards all have been dropping.
Storms get their power from the temperature differential between the Poles and the equator. Global warming raises temperatures at the Poles much more than at the equator. That narrows the Polar-Equator temperature differential, so we get fewer, milder storms.
Four hurricanes hit America this fall, but NASA reports a decline in landfalling Atlantic hurricanes during the past 50 years. Four in a year was just our annual roll of the dice.
What we've had is a relentless increase in extreme weather claims, driven by Greenpeace and their "Blame People First" campaign.
The physical evidence of past climate changes is reassuring. Ice cores, cave stalagmites and seabed sediments say we've had about 600 natural, moderate, solar-driven warmings in the last million years. The warmings, and the coolings that follow, come in 1500-year cycles (plus or minus 500 years). Satellites now monitor the mild variation in the sun's irradiance.
Temperatures were higher than today during the Medieval Warming of the 10th to 13th centuries-and the weather was the best in history. There were fewer and weaker storms.
In the 14th century, the climate shifted into the Little Ice Age. The weather turned cold and unstable. Northern Europe had a least four huge storm-driven seafloods that each drowned more than 100,000 people.
China's weather records show four major floods per century during the Medieval Warming, and eight per century during the Little Ice Age. China also had three times as many droughts during the Little Ice Age as during the warmings.
Greenpeace doesn't want us to know that the Medieval Warming and the Little Ice Age were the two halves of the world's most recent, natural 1500-year climate cycle.
The earthquake that caused the giant tsunami is the epitome of a natural disaster. The world should focus on helping the affected countries and stopping the spread of contaminated water diseases, and on improving the earthquake warning system, even though it may well be another 150 years before the ocean floor starts another killer chain of events.
Dennis T. Avery is based in Churchville, VA, and is director of the Hudson Institute's Center for Global Food Issues.
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