Climate disasters not increasing, says study

A study has found that climate disasters are not increasing, Insurance Business America reported Friday.

A ‘marked contradiction’ to UN claims

Italian researchers Gianluca Alimonti and Luigi Mariani observed trends in climate disaster reports between 1900 and 2022. They found that climate events are not increasing, but are more likely to be reported.

“We conclude that the patterns observed are largely attributable to progressively better reporting of natural disaster events,” wrote the researchers. They noted that these findings directly contradict claims made by the United Nations — particularly the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) — that the number of climate disasters is rising.

“The above result sits in marked contradiction to earlier analyses by two UN bodies (FAO and UNDRR), which predicts an increasing number of natural disasters and impacts in concert with global warming,” the study’s authors wrote. “Our analyses strongly refute this assertion as well as extrapolations published by UNDRR based on this claim.”

United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres has previously claimed that weather disasters have increased 500% over the last 50 years.

But this is not the first time that climate hysteria has been debunked by scientists.

‘Not a single natural disaster’ can be blamed on emissions

A 2022 report found that mainstream media and climate alarmists are falsely pinning natural disasters on man-made emissions, contradicting “reality and science.” The report was produced by the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), Heartland Institute, Energy & Environment Legal Institute, Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), and International Climate Science Coalition (ICSC).

“There is not a single natural disaster, nor trend in any type of natural disaster that can be credibly linked with emissions or whatever gradual ‘climate change’ may be occurring for whatever reason, including natural climate change,” said the report. “Attributing natural disaster damages to emissions and climate change is without a factual or scientific basis.” 

The report fact-checked ten separate instances of media outlets claiming that a natural disaster was caused by “climate change.”

In one example, the groups cited an article by the New York Times which sounded the alarm over heat waves in the United Kingdom. The Times blamed the heat on climate change, saying “heat waves around the world are becoming hotter, more frequent and longer lasting.” 

But the fact check noted that according to the National Climate Assessment, heat waves have actually declined dramatically in the US over the past 90 years, making it unlikely that Britain, or the world as a whole, is in danger of increased heat waves. 

“Moreover, during the UK heatwaves, average global warming remained fairly constant at 0.2°C to 0.3°C (0.36°F to 0.54°F) over the 1979-2000 average global temperature, an amount of warming that is not even really measurable,” said the report.  

In another case, the Washington Post tried to claim that global warming has been causing shorter winters, which is why the 2022 World Cup could only hold one of eight skiing races as of mid-November. 

“First, winter doesn’t begin until December 21,” the report explained. “Next, when World Cup skiing started in the 1960s, the season began in January. Now it begins in October, which is early- to mid-autumn. If the competition began in the winter everything would likely be okay because wintertime snow cover in the Northern Hemisphere has been increasing since the 1960s.” 

The report fact-checked other claims made by the media about Hurricane Ian, low water levels in Nevada’s Lake Mead, the Yellowstone River flooding, famine on the Horn of Africa, the China drought, and the European drought. 

“Regardless of one’s view of what passes as ‘climate science,’ the good news is that even researchers who believe that ‘climate change’ is a problem acknowledge that the number of weather-related deaths and the cost of weather-related damage are actually on the decline — despite ever-increasing emissions and whatever slight warming may be occurring,” the report concluded.