Don’t blame climate change for extreme weather

[bripat9643]

Note that this article was published in the Washington Post, of all places:

Bjorn Lomborg: Don?t blame climate change for extreme weather - The Washington Post

One of the most persistent claims in the climate debate is that global warming leads to more extreme weather.

President Obama has explicitly linked a warming climate to “more extreme droughts, floods, wildfires and hurricanes.” The White House warned this summer of “increasingly frequent and severe extreme weather events that come with climate change.”

Yet this is not supported by science. “General statements about extremes are almost nowhere to be found in the literature but seem to abound in the popular media,” climate scientist Gavin Smith of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies said last month. “It’s this popular perception that global warming means all extremes have to increase all the time, even though if anyone thinks about that for 10 seconds they realize that’s nonsense.”

It is understandable that a lot of well-meaning people, wanting stronger action on global warming, have tried to use the meme of extreme weather to draw attention. But alarmism and panic are rarely the best way to achieve good policies. The argument that global warming generally creates more extreme weather needs to be retired.​