With less than six months to go before the United Nations climate summit in Paris, the Environmental Protection Agency has released a new report claiming “global action” to reduce greenhouse gas emissions will bring fewer extreme droughts, floods, storms and wildfires.
The EPA released a report titled “Climate Change in the United States: Benefits of Global Action” which lays out the costs of not reducing greenhouse gas emissions to fight global warming. The report claims cutting emissions would result in billions of dollars in benefits for the U.S. and save thousands of lives every year.
The agency also claims there would be less “extreme weather” if emissions are cut on a global scale. An interesting claim given there is little to no evidence to support the notion that natural disasters are becoming more frequent or intense.
Regardless, the EPA says a global effort to cut emissions would result in about 70,000 fewer people dying from extreme heat and poor air quality in the U.S., less damage from flooding and storm surges on coastal properties and other weather events by 2100.
More interestingly, the EPA said global emissions cuts would mean an “estimated 40%-59% fewer severe and extreme droughts” in the U.S. by the year 2100. The report adds that in “the Southwest, the number of severe and extreme droughts is projected to nearly quadruple by the end of the century” if nothing is done. But with emissions reductions, “the incidence of drought is not projected to change substantially from present day.”
“Will the United States benefit from climate action? Absolutely,” EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy said in a statement. “We can save tens of thousands of American lives, and hundreds of billions of dollars, annually in the United States by the end of this century, but the sooner we act, the better off America and future generations of Americans will be.”
The Obama administration and its environmentalist allies have been playing up the tenuous link between global warming and extreme weather in recent years, with such claims exploding in the wake of Hurricane Sandy in 2012.
President Barack Obama recently told U.S. Coast Guard Academy graduates they would be on the front lines of the war against global warming. Obama has made issues like sea level rise and natural disasters into a national security matters.
“Climate change will impact every country on the planet,” Obama said. “No nation is immune. So I am here today to say that climate change constitutes a serious threat to global security, an immediate risk to our national security, and, make no mistake, it will impact how our military defends our country. And so we need to act— and we need to act now.”
The only problem for the Obama administration is that there’s little to no evidence linking global warming to an increase in the frequency or intensity of extreme weather. Even the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says there “is limited evidence of changes in extremes associated with other climate variables since the mid-20th century.”
The IPCC found “no significant observed trends in global tropical cyclone frequency over the past century. … No robust trends in annual numbers of tropical storms, hurricanes and major hurricanes counts have been identified over the past 100 years in the North Atlantic basin.”
The IPCC also found “there continues to be a lack of evidence and thus low confidence regarding the sign of trend in the magnitude and/or frequency of floods on a global scale” adding “that there is not enough evidence at present to suggest more than low confidence in a global-scale observed trend in drought or dryness (lack of rainfall) since the middle of the 20th century due to lack of direct observations, geographical inconsistencies in the trends.”
Others have confirmed the absence of increased extreme weather events, despite rising greenhouse gas levels.
University of Colorado climate researcher Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. told Congress in 2013 “It’s misleading, and just plain incorrect, to claim that disasters associated with hurricanes, tornadoes, floods or droughts have increased on climate timescales either in the United States or globally.”
“It is further incorrect to associate the increasing costs of disasters with the emission of greenhouse gases,” Pielke said.
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