Highlighted Article: EXTREME WEATHER IN 2020
- Posted On:
- Jun 3, 2021 at 3:00 AM
- Category
- Climate Change
From: GWPF
By: Ralph Alexander
Date: April, 2021
Executive summary
"The most striking feature of weather extremes in 2020 was not the extremes themselves, but the use of socio-economic studies of natural disasters to link extreme weather to global warming. Two international agencies, the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) – in conjunction with the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED) – and the International Red Cross (IFRC), both issued reports claiming that climate-related disasters are currently escalating.
However, such claims are wrong, as clearly shown by data presented in the two reports. Two different sections of the CRED-UNDRR report state that since 2000 the annual number of disasters has either risen significantly or been ‘relatively stable’. But these statements are completely contradicted by data in the same report showing that the number of climate-related disasters fell by 11% from 2000 to 2020.
The CRED-UNDRR report also falsely contends that more disasters occurred between 2000 and 2019 than during the preceding 20 years. This assertion is mirrored in the IFRC report, which makes the erroneous claim that annual climaterelated disasters have risen almost 35% since the 1990s. Both spurious claims arise from a failure to account for the major increase in disaster reporting engendered by the arrival of the Internet in the late 1990s.
Not only has the annual number of global disasters over the last 20 years declined, but the number of people killed by weather extremes has also been falling steadily over the past century" ...