Carl Sagan once said “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”Yet barely a day goes by without a Liberal cabinet minister claiming that man-made climate change is responsible for more wildfires, floods and droughts that “affect our economy, infrastructure, health and overall well being,” as per its latest television advertisements.Yet a new analysis by the Vancouver-based Fraser Institute finds little empirical evidence that these claims are true, and are in fact decreasing in severity over time. .“The evidence is clear—many of the claims that extreme weather events are increasing are simply not empirically true,”Kenneth Green, Fraser Institute.And the data comes from no less a source than the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate change (IPCC), according to researcher and senior fellow Kenneth Green.The study finds that global temperatures have increased moderately since 1950 but there is no evidence that extreme weather events are on the rise, including drought, flooding, hurricanes and even forest fires — which had been on a 30-year downward trend before last year.“The evidence is clear — many of the claims that extreme weather events are increasing are simply not empirically true,” Green said.“Before governments impose new regulations or enact new programs, they need to study the actual data and base their actions on facts, not unsubstantiated claims.”.Meanwhile, governments have implemented policies based on those claims that could have substantial negative impacts on society as a whole without considering the long-term consequences.“Claims about extreme weather should not be used as the basis for committing to long-term regulatory regimes that will hurt current Canadian standards of living, and leave future generations worse off,” it said.“Based on such assertions, governments are enacting ever more restrictive regulations on Canadian consumers of energy products, and especially Canada’s energy sector. These regulations impose significant costs on the Canadian economy and can exert downward pressure on Canadian’s standard of living.”.“This paper allows us to produce more confident predictions because it really brings down the upper end of future warming, and says that the most extreme scenario is less likely,”University of Washington study.Likewise, a study by the University of Washington (UW) published in Science Advances on April 17 questioned the relationship between carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere and global warming based on ice cores taken from the last ice age.The paper doesn’t change the best-case warming scenario from doubling CO2 — about 2 degrees Celsius average temperature increase worldwide — or the most likely estimate, which is about 3 degrees Celsius. But it reduces the worst-case scenario for doubling of CO2 by a full degree, from 5 degrees Celsius to 4 degrees Celsius.In short, the study shows that CO2 played a smaller role in setting ice age temperatures than previously estimated, which means the most dire predictions for CO2 related warming are less likely over the coming decades.“This paper allows us to produce more confident predictions because it really brings down the upper end of future warming, and says that the most extreme scenario is less likely,” said senior author Kyle Armour.The research was funded by the National Science Foundation, the US Department of National Defence Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the European Union’s Horizon 2020 program.
