Global warming did not cause Sandy

By Lord Monckton

It was bound to happen. Global warming’s profiteers of doom did not even wait until after the funerals of those killed by Superstorm Sandy before cruelly and disgustingly exploiting their deaths and the grief of their families by blaming Sandy on man’s supposedly baneful influence on the climate.

The tediously predictable Huffington-Puffington quoted Kevin Trenberth, a campaigning climate-extremist, as saying, “The past few years have been marked by unusually severe extreme weather characteristic of climate change. The oceans are warmer, and the atmosphere above the oceans is warmer and wetter. This new normal changes the environment for all storms and makes them more intense and with much more precipitation.”

As an appointed expert reviewer for the forthcoming “Fifth Assessment Report” to be published by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, I am going to set the facts straight.

What the Huff-‘n’-Puff did not say is that even Trenberth does not blame Sandy on global warming. He says the actual heating of the atmosphere is too small to cause huge storms.

Munich Re, the most relentlessly shameless and habitually inaccurate of the insurance giants who have made concerted (and fortunately unsuccessful) efforts to talk up premiums using global warming as a pretext, reports that in the past 30 years there has been a near-fivefold increase in damaging weather-related events in North America, which, of course, it blames on us.

However, Dr. Roger Pielke has demonstrated that the increase in extreme-weather damage has more to do with the fast-growing number of people and buildings in harm’s way than with worsening weather.

The U.S. National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration is one of many bodies that have profited mightily from the global-warming scare. When I was testifying before Congress a couple of years ago its director, Tom Karl, tried to tell me I had been wrong to say there had been no increase in the frequency of hurricanes making Atlantic landfall in 100 years.

Mr. Karl produced a graph that showed I was indeed wrong. To his dismay, his own graph showed no trend in Atlantic landfall not just for the 100 years I had mentioned but for 150 years. Oops!

If even NOAA says Sandy is not attributable to global warming, you can put that in the bank. And that is exactly what NOAA’s Dr. Martin Hörling says: “Great events can have little causes. In this case the immediate cause is most likely little more than the coincidental alignment of a tropical storm with an extra-tropical storm. …

“As to underlying causes, neither the frequency nor the intensity of tropical or extra-tropical cyclones is projected to appreciably change due to climate change, nor have there been indications of a change in their statistical behavior over this region in recent decades (see the IPCC’s 2012 Special Report on Extreme Weather).”

Splendidly, Dr. Hörling concludes: “So, while it will rain like ‘black cats and Frankenweenies’ over the mid-Atlantic, this is not some spell conjured upon by great external forces – unless you believe in the monster flicks of Universal Studios fame.”

Dr. Ryan Maue of Florida State University produces a monthly-updated accumulated-cyclone-energy index – a 24-month running sum of the frequency, intensity and duration of all tropical cyclones worldwide. For most of the past couple of years it has been at its least level since satellite records began a third of a century ago.

Here, in one long, breathless sentence, is the complete answer to the bed-wetters who say global warming caused Sandy:

Extreme weather comes and goes in cycles (get used to it); occasionally you get a rare concatenation of circumstances (as we scientists say, “s–t happens”); there are more weather-watching instruments now than there were (think satellites); more reports of bad weather circulate (and reach a wider audience than ever); climate extremists unimpressively blame global warming for opposite extremes (heat and cold, flood and drought); there has been far too little warming so far to make any major difference (1 degree F in 60 years); the warming of recent years is well within natural variability (from 1695-1735, before man could have been to blame, central England warmed by 4 degrees F in just 40 years); extreme events are just as likely in cooler as in warmer weather (mathematically speaking, the climate behaves chaotically); warmer weather causes fewer storms, not more (thanks to temperature differentials that diminish as the world warms); there has been no acceleration in the rate of global warming (it’s stopped for now); and the knock-down argument is that there has been no global warming for almost 16 years (none of the discredited models predicted that: instead, in 2008 the modelers said that 15 years or more without global warming would demonstrate a discrepancy between their computer predictions and real-world observations and measurements).

Warming predicted for the day after tomorrow cannot have caused a superstorm today when there was no warming to cause it the day before yesterday, or for 16 years before that. Elementary, my dear Watson.

In a world of science and reason – rather than of shrieking alarm in ruthless pursuit of anti-scientific, racketeering, rent-seeking profit at your expense and mine – nothing more would need to be said than that.

Lord Monckton

Christopher Monckton of Brenchley, high priest of climate skepticism, advised Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, wrote leaders for the Yorkshire Post, was editor of the Catholic paper The Universe, managing editor of the Telegraph Sunday Magazine, assistant editor of Today, and consulting editor of the Evening Standard. He invented the million-selling "Eternity Puzzles," "Sudoku X" and a promising treatment for infections. See the Science & Public Policy Institute. Read more of Lord Monckton's articles here.


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