The climate media complex is making new claims about global warming causing increases in flooding, but objective evidence clearly contradicts the claims. Perhaps the media should check actual scientific evidence before making false global warming claims. Or maybe they do, but simply prefer not to report the truth.
The UK Guardian published an August 30 article, “What 500,000 Americans hit by floods can teach us about fighting climate change.” Claiming that global warming is making floods worse, and telling personal interest stories about people who have dealt with floods, the article’s sole scientific authority cited to support its claim is data showing more people have filed flood insurance claims in recent years, especially in comparison to the Reagan administration years.
The problem with such an assertion is that there are many more people living in the United States now than during the Reagan administration. When Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980, there were 227 million people living in the United States. Currently, there are 329 million people living in the United States. More people living in America means more people will likely file claims of every sort – including flooding claims – regardless of whether there is any global warming or any increase in floods.
Also, urbanization and changes in policies to remove dams and otherwise restore rivers and streams to more natural conditions have also increased the frequency of flooding events.
So how can we discern a climate signal – or lack thereof – regarding flooding?
To solve this challenge, scientists have identified and studied the water volume history of primarily natural rivers and streams versus, to discern any changes in water flow and flooding events that may be caused by climate. The studies show there has been no increase in flooding events in such rivers and streams.
A 2009 study in the peer-reviewed Journal of the American Water Resources Association reported, “There is broad evidence … for increased magnitudes of low and moderate flows both regionally and nationally.” In other words, there is some increase in streamflow during periods of drought and other times when streamflow has been low. But these are not periods of floods. More streamflow during times of drought is actually a good sign.
And what about during times of high streamflow? The study reports, “trends in high flows have been much less evident.”
The study further reports, “At a national scale, only a small proportion of the gages measuring dominantly natural streamflow … show upward trends in the annual maximum average daily discharge.”
Those results were confirmed four year later in a 2013 study published in the peer-reviewed Hydrological Sciences Journal. “It has not been possible to attribute rain-generated peak streamflow trends to anthropogenic climate change over the past several decades,” the study reported.
Moreover, the study observed “no gauge-based evidence has been found for a climate-driven, globally widespread change in the magnitude/frequency of floods during the last decades.”
Funny how the Guardian failed to mention that actual scientific evidence debunked the notion that global warming is causing more floods. But that would interfere with a good alarmist climate scare, wouldn’t it?