Comments by "Old Scientist" (@OldScientist) on "Floods, heavy rain, extreme weather - Why we need to build differently | DW Documentary" video.

There are over 5 million excess deaths per annum globally due to abnormal temperatures from the 2000-2019 study led Prof. Guo of Monash University. It found that over 90% of excess deaths were caused by excess COLD rather than excess heat. So, in a world with increasingly mild temperatures, there will be less excess death. Lives will be saved. Warming is good not bad. A 2022 Lancet study reported 791 heat-related excess deaths and 60,753 cold-related excess deaths in England and Wales each year during the years spanning 2000-2019. That’s an excess death ratio of about 85 to 1 for cold vs. hot temperatures. Due to warmer urban temperatures, the number of premature cold-related excess deaths avoided averaged 447 per year from 1976-2019 in the city of London alone (Hajat et, 2024).
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If you're worried about deaths due to climate, cold temperature events are the big killer, not heat. It is estimated that 5.1 million people annually die in association with non-optimal temperatures. 4.6 million are link to the cold, so over 90% (Zhao et al, 2021). And it is worst in the warmer parts of the world. 98% of temperature related deaths in SubSaharan Africa are due to the cold. Temperature events may be linked to upto 10% of human deaths annually, and therefore a greater cause of mortality than air pollution. In a warming world there will be less death.
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@swiftlytiltingplanet8481 I would be interested in a reference to support your point, so that I could follow that up.
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@swiftlytiltingplanet8481 No famine death data. Oh dear. You want to start in the 1960s. That's fine. I understand why. Can I recommend you pop over to the website "our world in data" and go to the page "Annual Heat Wave Index in the United States"? Don't worry, it sources its data from NOAA. Now you should see a red spikey thing - that's a graph. You'll enjoy moving the slider along the bottom. Notice that all the tallest spikes are in the 1930s. The very tallest (1936) is 1.34 on the severity index. The most recent readings are around 0.1, so that's a factor of 13. Imagine if you had a heatwave like that now. People like you would be screaming and dropping from apoplexy. How did your ancestors survive without air-con (or global warming!)? Anyway, there's only one, just one, place on this graph you can start and show an increasing trend. That's the 1960s (less than 0.05). And that's why you've chosen it (or it was chosen for you). Another lesson to draw from this is that there is zero positive correlation between the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere and heatwaves in the US.
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@swiftlytiltingplanet8481 The famine in the Horn of Africa is endemic not because of climatic factors but because of bad governance and poverty. If you compare these regions to the Gulf States, the climate of the Gulf is similar, although even drier, but the latter have a much higher standard of living due their wealth of fossil fuels and better social organisation. What the Horn of Africa needs is a good dose of reliable energy from fossil fuels to raise their living standards.
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@swiftlytiltingplanet8481 One of the relevant papers referenced by the IPCC in support - Perkins-Kirkpatrick and Lewis, 2020 - has the number and length of heatwaves increasing globally (1951-2017) as you would expect in a slowly warming world, but there is no trend for average intensity. However, I dug a little deeper. The data that these heatwave assumptions are built upon are largely non-existent or fabricated. There are two data sources used: GHCN and Berkeley Earth. At least with the one data source GHCN it shows there is no reliable data going back to the 1950s across almost the whole of Indonesia, India, Arabia, Africa, plus Central and South America. The other data source Berkeley Earth "observational" dataset - now that's a misrepresentation! - just makes it up. It's supposed to be high resolution (1° lat, 1° long 69x54.6miles grid) and go back to 1850. So I thought, hmm, Somalia, the Ogaden and Arabia are looking a bit toasty and red on the maps. Let's check out the data. I found Berkeley Earth’s data sources. I reviewed WMO, GSOD, and NCAR. For the period reviewed in the paper (1950-2014) in the Horn of Africa there were no meteorological station that cover that period. That's right - zero. In the whole of Arabia there were three, just three. Just like Arabia, the whole thing is built on sand. There will be huge parts of the globe where no measurements will have been taken until the advent of satellite technology in the 70s. Very interestingly, if you look at the charts on Fig. 1 on the paper, the US, especially the eastern half looks distinctly unaffected by any increase in heatwaves. Bit of a blue tinge there, I think you'll agree. It's much more difficult to fudge that one because of the huge number of long-term meteorological stations in the US. And why do they start in 1950, and not 1930 or 1900? Hmm.
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@swiftlytiltingplanet8481 The UN's IPCC AR6 report, chapter 11 'Weather and Climate Extreme Events in a Changing Climate' summarises the fact that certain severe weather events cannot be detected as increasing, nor attributed to human caused climate change: Pages 1761 - 1765, Table 11.A.2 Synthesis table summarising assessments Heavy Precipitation: 24 out of 45 global regions low confidence in observed trend (12 medium confidence), 43 out of 45 low confidence in human attribution. Agricultural Drought: 31 out of 45 global regions low confidence in observed trend (14 medium confidence. No high confidence assessment). 42 out 45 low confidence in human attribution (3 medium, no high confidence). Ecological Drought as above. Hydrological Drought: 38 out of 45 global regions low confidence in observed trend. 43 out 45 low confidence in human attribution (2 medium confidence, no high confidence). So the IPCC are saying we didn't cause droughts and we didn't make it rain. How surprising! There is no objective observational evidence that we are living in a global climate crisis.
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@swiftlytiltingplanet8481 You want to start in the 1960s. That's fine. I understand why. Can I recommend you pop over to the website "our world in data" and go to the page "Annual Heat Wave Index in the United States"? Don't worry, it sources its data from NOAA. Now you should see a red spikey thing - that's a graph. You'll enjoy moving the slider along the bottom. Notice that all the tallest spikes are in the 1930s. The very tallest (1936) is 1.34 on the severity index. The most recent readings are around 0.1, so that's a factor of 13. Imagine if you had a heatwave like that now. People like you would be screaming and dropping from apoplexy. How did your ancestors survive without air-con (or global warming!)? Anyway, there's only one, just one, place on this graph you can start and show an increasing trend. That's the 1960s (less than 0.05). And that's why you've chosen it (or it was chosen for you). Another lesson to draw from this is that there is zero positive correlation between the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere and heatwaves in the US.
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@swiftlytiltingplanet8481 Heat waves have not been increasing in intensity or frequency in the United States, which has by far the best meteorological data both spatially and temporally. Data from NOAA's Climate Reference Network shows no sustained increase in daily high temperatures in the United States since 2005 when that network began. In recent decades in the United States, heat waves have been far less severe than they were in the 1930s. At that time Heatwaves were more than 6 times worse with greater frequency and covering a larger area than the last decade (EPA). The most severe heatwave year was 1936, and was about 13 times worse than current. Many states in 1936 achieved temperatures 15° hotter than the present. The all-time high temperature records set in most states occurred in the first half of the twentieth century. The percentage of US Historical Climatology Network Stations reaching or exceeding 95°F (35°C) was at a record low (1895-2023) of 51% in 2023. The record high was 1931 at 93%. The trend has been consistently downwards since the thirties. The climate crisis was 90 years ago. You missed it.
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@swiftlytiltingplanet8481 Do you have any data to back up your assertions? As I've already pointed out their is low confidence in a change in drought patterns and its attribution to human activity. For the Horn of Africa, Somalia specifically, World Bank data shows annual rainfall is on an upward trend, and the climatic period 1931-1960 had far lower precipitation in all seasons than the period 1991-2020. Somalia's climate is wetter than in the past. The data is the exact opposite of what you assert.
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@swiftlytiltingplanet8481 What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence. There has been a 10% decline in natural disasters since 2000 (CRED). Normalised disaster losses have decreased since 1990 and human mortality due to extreme weather has decreased by more than 95% since 1920, so you're 50 times less likely to die from a climate-related disaster in a world that's 1°C warmer than 100 years ago (EM-DAT, CRED/UC). Deaths from drought have declined by 99%!
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@swiftlytiltingplanet8481 When you use data from the World Bank and global insurance, and try to measure the cost to society of climate change, you find the cost is minimal and diminishing. Global weather losses as a percentage of Global GDP sank from 0.25% to below 0.20% between 1990 and 2022. Based on data published in the Lancet in 2019, GDP percentage Climate-Related Disaster Losses have declined in all global income categories, with the most noticeable declines in the lower income countries (Watts et al., 2019). Data. Global data. No climate crisis.
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@swiftlytiltingplanet8481 "As regards disease, the Lancet's Countdown on Health and Climate Change (2019) shows Climate-related deaths are a small proportion of all-cause fatalities (1990–2017). That is based on data per IHME (2019), and between 1990 and 2017, the cumulative age-standardized death rate (ASDRs) from climate-sensitive diseases and events (CSDEs) dropped from 8.1% of the all-cause ASDR to 5.5%, while the age-standardized burden of disease, measured by disability-adjusted life years lost (DALYs) declined from 12.0% to 8.0% of all-cause age-standardized DALYs. Thus, the burdens of death and disease from CSDEs are small, and getting smaller. However, the declines in death and disease rates from CSDEs since 1990 are only a small proportion of longer-term declines across the globe. In the USA, one of the few places with good long-term data, death rates from dysentery, typhoid, paratyphoid, other gastrointestinal diseases, and malaria – all water-related diseases and therefore, almost by definition, climate-sensitive declined 99–100% between 1900 and 1970. We are solving our problems with CSDEs faster than we are solving our other health problems." Indur M. Goklany Couldn't have said it better myself.
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@swiftlytiltingplanet8481 Oh and thinking about UN reports, here's some quotes from the UN's IPCC AR6 WG1: Flooding - “the assessment of observed trends in the magnitude of runoff, streamflow, and flooding remains challenging, due to the spatial heterogeneity of the signal and to multiple drivers” "Confidence about peak flow trends over past decades on a global scale is low." "In summary there is low confidence in the human influence on the changes in high river flows on the global scale. Confidence is in general low in attributing changes in the probability or magnitude of flood events to human influence" So in absence of detected trends, there won’t be much ability to attribute to humans. You can't say floods are caused by, driven by, or intensified by climate change. The evidence doesn’t support that. Drought - "There is low confidence that human influence has affected trends in meteorological droughts in most regions" So no real evidence we changed the weather to cause periods of dryness. Tropical Cyclones (TC) - "Identifying past trends in TC remains a challenge...There is low confidence in most reported long-term (multidecadal to centennial) trends in TC frequency - or intensity based metrics" So we can't spot a trend and therefore we can't really attribute that unknown trend to us humans. Storminess - outside the tropics (ETCs) - "There is overall low confidence is recent changes in the total number of ETCs over both hemispheres" "Overall there is low confidence in past-century trends in the number and intensity of the strongest ETCs" So we don't know what's happening with winter storms, so we can't say it's us that changed them. Tornadoes, hail, lightning, thunderstorms, extreme winds - "It is not straightforward to make a synthesizing view of trends in severe connective storms [thunderstorms] in different regions. In particular, observational trends in tornadoes, hail and lightning associated with severe connective storms are not robustly detected" "the observed intensity of extreme winds is becoming less severe in lower to mid latitudes" That's between 60°N and 60°S, so pretty much where everyone lives.
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@swiftlytiltingplanet8481 "Research determined that a 1C increase in temperature translates to 12% in GDP decline." Oh it does, does it? That's strange: Since 1900 the global temperature has increased by 1.3°C (so more than "1C"). Despite that humanity has flourished. Life expectancy has more than doubled from 32 to 73 years. Literacy has quadrupled from 21% to 86%. Humans are seven times more productive ($2,241 to $15,212 GDP per capita, per annum). People are better fed, having ⅓ more calories every day (2,192kcal to 2,928kcal). Global extreme poverty rates have tumbled from 70% to less than 10% (<$1 a day). And death from weather events have collapsed by a factor 50 from 241 million down to 5 million even while the global population has increased by a factor of 5. There is no climate crisis. There is no evidence of a climate crisis. Even if there is radical climate change (and that is a very, very big 'if') with the manifestation of numerous tipping points (including permafrost thaw, ocean hydrates dissociation, Arctic sea ice loss, rainforest dieback, polar ice sheet loss, AMOC slowdown, and Indian monsoon variability) the disruption to economic growth and well-being will be minimal. The world's economy will continue to grow making everyone much richer. By 2050 world mean consumption per capita should be $29,100 with tipping points or $29,300 without tipping points. Barely noticeable. Apart from it being approximately double what it is now. By 2100 world mean consumption per capita should be $71,000 with or without tipping points (Dietz et al, 2021). This is the most fortunate time to be alive in the whole of history.
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