20 Aug 2004 Extreme Weather & Global Warming

Iain Murray has a good post on extreme weather events and global warming on The Commons Blog. Quoting Spiked’s Brendan O’Neill, the post says, in part:

Dr Mark Saunders, a weather expert at University College London (UCL), says we need to cool down. ‘I don’t think the weather we have seen is particularly unusual, to be honest. Somewhere in the world you will always get extreme weather events – whether it’s a storm, a flood, or a drought. There are always people being affected by extreme weather. There is no study to my knowledge which shows that more people are being affected now, or that more people will be affected by freak weather this year than in previous years.’

There’s more in Iain’s post.

Back in 1998, husband David wrote a paper for us on this topic. Titled “Don’t Like the Weather? Don’t Blame it on Global Warming,” the paper examined charges that mid-90s forest fires, heat waves, blizzards and hurricanes were indicators of global warming. Because the paper reviews a century’s worth of trends on these extreme weather events, it remains one of the most popular downloads on the National Center’s website even now, six years later.