Bad science on climate change....

The Global Humanitarian Forum issued a report that is just plain silly...

The GHF’s report, titled “The Anatomy of a Silent Crisis,” claims that predominantly man-made climate change is already killing 300,000 people a year, and causing suffering to hundreds of millions, at an annual cost of US$125-billion. The impact is projected to get much worse, killing half a million annually by 2030.

These claims have no basis in fact or science.

Prof. Pielke pointed out that the report’s assertions fly in the face of even those meant to support it. He noted that the Geo-Risks group at Munich Re insurance (on some of whose projections the GHF report is based) earlier this year acknowledged that human-caused impact on natural disasters simply could not be seen. Moreover, no clear link was likely to be observed in the near future. The GHF report meanwhile itself acknowledges that “there is not yet any widely accepted global estimate of the share of weather-related disasters that are attributable to climate change.”

So make one up. And emotionalize the issue with lots of colour pictures of poor people. Also, claim validation in the fact that “The frequency and intensity of weather-related disasters is often associated with climate change in public debate and common perceptions.” Even if those “perceptions” are entirely based on the type of alarmist junk peddled by the GHF.

The figure of 300,000 is arrived at, according to Prof. Pielke by “an approach that is grounded in neither logic, science or common sense.”

The report relies for most of its death projections on material from the World Health Organization (which has also admitted deep in the footnotes that the impact of anthropogenic climate change can’t be accurately measured). Nevertheless, using the WHO’s pick-a-number modelling approach, the GHF attributes 4%-5% of diarrhea deaths, 4% of malaria deaths and 4%-5% of dengue fever deaths (in 2010) to greenhouse-gas emissions. These percentages render absolute numbers that, more than suspiciously, exactly double the number of deaths projected in a 2003 WHO report.

The remainder of deaths are attributed to bad weather, but again the figures are misleading. The report compares the number of “loss events” reported from earthquakes vs. weather disasters from 1980 through 2005 (the year of Hurricane Katrina). Then it draws nice straight trend lines (see graphic), notes that weather disaster loss events have increased relative to those due to earthquakes, and attributes the difference to climate change (since earthquakes obviously have nothing to do with climate change).

But how much of the increased losses relate to increased insurance, and to increased building in weather-prone regions vs. earthquake-prone ones? More fundamentally, why should there be any correlation at all between earthquakes and the weather? Obviously, the notion that there are three times as many floods (as opposed to flood-related “loss events”) today than in 1980 is ridiculous, but that is the impression created by the report.

The report also relies (almost inevitably) on the widely criticized Stern Review for its mammoth economic loss projections. However, not content with Lord Stern’s grossly doctored estimates of doom, the GHF report takes his assumptions about the adverse impact of a rise of 2.5C on GDP and doubles it!

Prof. Pielke concludes that you can’t counter the GHF’s claims “because there is no data on which to adjudicate them. We can rely on hunches, feelings, divine inspiration, goat entrails or whatever, but you cannot appeal to the actual data record to differentiate these claims. So when people argue about them they are instead arguing about feelings and wishes, which does not make for a good basis for science.”