Disaster Losses From Global Warming Debunked

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in an interview on Pakistan Television said "there is a linkage" between the recent occurrence of natural disasters and climate change. She went on to opine "We are changing the climate of the world." She might have thought twice before making such a sweeping prophesy if she could have read about a just-released study that found no convincing link between losses from disasters and climate change. The report "Have disaster losses increased due to anthropogenic climate change?" was written by Laurens M. Bouwer, a researcher at Vrije University in Amsterdam. In a blog post on the study, New York Times author Andrew Revkin observes, "... front-page thought and the eagerness of climate campaigners to jog the public have sometimes created a tendency to tie mounting losses from weather-related disasters to human-driven global warming."

According Revkin, the Bouwer analyzed nearly two-dozen papers assessing trends in disaster losses in light of climate change. The author concluded that a rise in disaster losses is due primarily to more investment getting in harm's way as communities are increasingly located in areas prone to natural hazards.

The Secretary of State and other "climate campaigners" should hold off on making sweeping generalizations regarding global warming. We would be much better served by a close examination of the facts regarding climate change than by fear-mongering.  Scientific predictions by politicians are scarier than any threats from global warming.

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