Comments by "Old Scientist" (@OldScientist) on "Nebraska students demand action by elected officials on growing climate crisis" video.

  1. The Global Land Precipitation Anomaly from AR5 will disappoint with deviations from the average increasing by 0.2% per decade, but if you look at the actual data, it's just very variable over the decades. Drought appears to be decreasing globally (Watts et al, 2018) measured by SPI 1901-2017. For every million people on earth, annual deaths from climate-related causes (extreme temperature, drought, flood, storms, wildfires) declined 98%--from an average of 247 per year during the 1920s to 2.5 in per year during the 2010s. Data on disaster deaths come from (EM-DAT, CRED / UCLouvain, Brussels,Belgium. )
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  2. As regards regards the rate of temperature change, the warming in the current modern era has been neither consistent nor rapid both temporally and spatially. The climate of the US in the 20th century is good example of this. The US has by far the best actual temperature recordings for this period with very little coverage elsewhere outside of Europe. Data from NOAA (2021) shows uneven warming focused on the South East through until it peaks in the 1930s. Where it should be noted the highest average maxima temperature records remain to this day. Some areas of the West showed negligible warming. There then followed a general continent-wide cooling into the 1970s. Then the West began to warm, but the South East continued to cool, so that by the end of the century some SE areas were cooler than they had been a century before. This pattern of uneven warming continues up to the present day. All of this demonstrates to my mind that the climate has a strong internal variability without the requirement for any external anthropogenic forcing. Globally satellite data shows how variable the Earth's climate is with changes up or down of more than 1°C occurring from one year to the next. However, overall the Earth's ecosystems are resilient to these fluctuations, as most species are eurytopic enough to survive these changes.
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