Some Good News—About Natural Disasters
In his posthumously published book “Factfulness,” the Swedish statistician Hans Rosling describes a paradox: “The image of a dangerous world has never been broadcast more effectively than it is now, while the world has never been less violent and more safe.”
A case in point: natural disasters. The earth will always be volatile, but despite recent fires, volcanoes, and hurricanes, humanity currently is experiencing a stretch of good fortune when it comes to disasters.
It’s difficult to be “factful” about disasters—the vivid trauma of each event distracts observers from the long-term decrease in destructiveness.
But climate activists make the problem worse by blaming every extreme weather event on human-caused climate change, hoping to scare people into elevated concern.
Disasters certainly continue to cause catastrophic damage across the globe. The annual cost of disasters has doubled since reliable accounting of all events worldwide began in 1990, rising from about $100 billion to $200 billion a year in 2017 dollars.
But it’s deceptive to track disasters primarily in terms of aggregate cost. Since 1990, the global population has increased by more than 2.2 billion, and the global economy has more than doubled in size. This means more lives and wealth are at risk with each successive disaster.
Despite this increased exposure, disasters are claiming fewer lives. Data tracked by Our World in Data shows that from 2007-17, an average of 7,000 people each year were killed by natural disasters.
In the decade 50 years earlier, the annual figure was more than 37,000. Seven thousand is still far too many, but the reduction represents enormous progress.
The material cost of disasters also has decreased when considered as a proportion of the global economy. Since 1990, economic losses from disasters have decreased by about 20{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} as a proportion of worldwide gross domestic product.
The trend still holds when the measurement is narrowed to weather-related disasters, which decreased similarly as a share of global GDP even as the dollar cost of disasters increased.
The decrease in disaster damage isn’t a surprise, because as the world population and economy have grown, the incidence of the most damaging extreme events has hardly changed.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported in 2014 that there has been no increase in hurricanes, floods, droughts or tornadoes within the past 30 years. And 2018 is on track to have the lowest losses from disasters as a share of global GDP since 1990.
It is then no surprise that the climate-disaster scare campaign has been ineffective at swaying public opinion. Gallup reported earlier this year that 63{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} of Americans worried a “great deal” or “fair amount” about climate change—the same level as in 1989 when the question was first posed.
But though popular worry hasn’t boiled over, the public debate around climate change has become more politicized, more partisan and less “factful.”
In place of today’s unproductive scare campaign, activists and the media should facilitate debate on the merits of actual climate-policy proposals, such as a carbon tax or improved flood defenses.
Carbon dioxide emissions have indeed contributed to a global temperature increase and may yet influence extreme weather, so the public and policymakers must decide the best ways to reduce emissions and increase society’s resilience to extreme weather.
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James McGinn
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Empirical sciences are based on testing, measurement, and reason. Conversational sciences are based on tradition, rhetoric, and authority. Empirical science gains credibility by doing experiments. Conversational sciences gain credibility through the pretense of being empirical.
There are many conversational sciences. These disciplines take full advantage of the publics laziness and gullibility. The public has an appetite for simple models and conversational sciences provide them just that.
You guys need to broaden your horizons a bit. Climatology is one of many disciplines that has evolved along the lines of providing the simple and artificially dramatic explanations that the public craves. Stop being so cloistered–talking only to each other–and so obsessed with one discipline that is only a small part of one of the many disciplines that gain credibility through the pretense of being empirical.
You are only seeing the top of the iceberg.
Meteorology is a Cargo Cult Science
https://www.thunderbolts.info/forum/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=16594
James McGinn / Solving Tornadoes
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tom0mason
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James McGinn,
You say —
“These disciplines take full advantage of the publics laziness and gullibility.”
You do neither yourself nor the public any favors by referring to them as such. Please understand not everyone has ability, or desire to understand, or the time to study whatever subject you believe they should know better. Most people act based upon the information they have to hand and can understand, to attempt to do what ever is best for themselves, their families, and to the wider public. Also the public have excellent skills in retaining story-lines (or theories), even very involved, complex, and convoluted ones. So I believe it is not the complexity of the message that worries the public but the unimaginatively austere, fun-less method of delivery from academics and governments. At least Feynman had the good grace to attempt to make the subject more approachable or even understandable, through fun!
People will soon get bored of the current ‘fashion’ of climate worrying as the temperature drops during this solar minimum, as many of the predicted catastrophes fail to arrive, and politicians move on to a new ‘scare’ to worry them with (food or plastic pollution?).
From your example link I don’t see much of your “Empirical sciences are based on testing, measurement, and reason.” I do see an opinion based on a conversational style of science based on “
tradition,rhetoric, and authority.” Maybe you could do more to enlighten me, and the public, using just understandable empirical methodologies and not ‘outmoded’ traditions.Please do not misunderstand what I write. I believe you could well have a good point in what you say. What I do not think helps your cause, or public understanding of these things, is the manner in which you say them. The public in the main, do not react well to be spoken down to as if by an ivory tower academic — which I fear you would seem to be.
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James McGinn
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You consensus based nitwits think its sciences job to convince and entertain you. You accept none of the burden associated with struggling with specific points. I point out that current theory of storms carries three major assumptions that have never been tested, measured, or even defined. Do you turn to meteorologists and ask for an explanation? Hell no. You turn on me. You retards attack the messenger. You think It’s my job to convince you. You and the millions of brain-dead believers in all that is conventional are the problem. It’s not my job to teach you retards how to think like a scientist. If it isn’t obvious that meteorologists need to either test their assumptions or admit that they really don’t have any idea about the atmosphere, then there’s nothing I can do for you.
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jerry krause
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Hi James,
“Empirical sciences are based on testing, measurement, and reason.”
Empirical (Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary): “Depending on experience or observation alone, without due regard to science and theory.” Hence, empirical science has no relationship to reason unless you have reasoned some result like E=m x C^2 or that gravity might bend light (radiation) occurring some mathematically predicted way. Then these ideas can be tested. Whereas, in the case of gravity, we have observations how ‘things’ respond to ‘gravity’ at the same time Newton had to admit he had no idea about what the cause of gravity might be. As he wrote (translated by Motte): “And to us it is enough that gravity does really exist, and act according to the laws we have explained, and abundantly serves to account for all the motions of the celestial bodies, and of our sea.”.
I have yet to read in your writings one experiment described, whose result refutes any idea of meteorology that one finds in any commonly used introductory meteorology textbook. It can be done but I have not found that you have.
If you have, please inform me what this test was in full detail so that I and others can check if we can reproduce your observation (measurement).
Have a good day, Jerry
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James McGinn
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Jerry,
Tell us why you believe a model (convection model of storm theory) that has never been tested and that is so convoluted and vague as to remain forever untestable.
As I stated, it’s not my job to teach you how to be a scientists. The world if full of vague nitwits who manage to extract a of limitless supply of confidence from truth they are never able to enunciate.
You were in the vicinity of Linus Pauling when he made one of the biggest blunders is science and you failed to correct it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIQSubWJeNg
tom0mason
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“Do you turn to meteorologists and ask for an explanation? Hell no. You turn on me. You retards attack the messenger. “
As far as I read it, I have not ‘turned on you’. I have not attcked you or your message.
Please Mr McGinn, understand I am not against your ideas. I’m against your apparent anger! You will never get your message out by shouting at people (Al Gore tries but I’m not convinced that he can persuade many). And yes I’ve just compared you to Al Gore!
As you say science proceeds with experiments and observations. All I ask is where are yours, and by using your evidence, how best can you make the public better aware of your finding.
As for meteorologists they appear to understand much to us brain-dead many because NOBODY (including you) have convincingly shown (with observed evidence) that the weather works differently.
” It’s not my job to teach you retards how to think like a scientist.” If it is not your job to explain then you are no scientist! For unless science is explainable it is little more than ‘magic’ and you the magician.
Please Mr. McGinn, remember we ‘retards’ are many, and in many countries hold the vote. Many of us ‘retards’ wish to know more but have not the tools to learn enough — but we still vote. If you want things to change you have to learn that unless you can convince the public (by showing your evidence) you’ll get little backing from the many of us ‘retards’.
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James McGinn
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Tom:
I’m against your apparent anger!
JMcG:
I think my anger is appropriate given there is only one of me and there are millions upon millions of brain-dead believers happy to pretend they understand what actually makes no sense.
Meteorologists lie to the public for the same reasons climatologists lie to the public: money. They refuse to discuss details because they know that doing so will reveal their own confusion–this being the exact same reason climatologists refuse to debate. Likewise, they refuse to discuss/debate the fact that their model is filled with untested, untestable, and even undefinable verbiage, preferring to allow the gullible public to create their own details, knowing that the public is too lazy and convoluted to follow through on anything.
The truth is that meteorologists are just as mystified by storms and the relationship of water, wind and temperature as is a 5 year old child. They won’t admit this for the same reason climatologists won’t admit that there is no reason to assume CO2 causes the atmosphere to heat up, again its all about money.
You make the inane claim that meteorologists, “appear to understand much.” I say science should not be about appearances. Science should be about reproducible experimental evidence.
I suggest you redirect your indignation to the people that have been lying to us for about 170 years by presenting us with a phoney model that is based on nothing more than a strained analogy to a pot boiling on a stove.
We all grow up believing that the moisture in clear air is gaseous
https://www.thunderbolts.info/forum/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=16471
James McGinn / Solving Tornadoes
jerry krause
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Hi James,
I started viewing one of your links which claims that it is not known: Why is water, or any liquid, still a fluid? The answer is, regardless of the possible intermolecular attractions involved between molecules, temperature is a measure of the average kinetic energy of each of the 6.023 X 10^23 molecules of water in 18ml of liquid water. Hence, until water cools to 0C, the system is too dynamic to allow the molecules to maintain the rigid, less dynamic, structure that we call ice. But because the hydrogen bonding requires a number of molecules to be arranged in a 3 dimensional ‘more’ static structure of ice, fluid water molecules, are prone to cool far below 0C if there is no rigid solid surface available on which individual water molecules can ‘stick’ one by one to the solid (less dynamic) surface one by one. So, without such a needed surface, dynamic liquid water molecules are prone to remain fluid well below the temperature of 0C. We call this non-equilibrium condition supercooling. But if we start with ice well below 0C, water molecules might evaporate (sublime) from the surface, because each molecule of water in the solid ice (including the surface molecules) still has an average kinetic energy as determined by its temperature but never will the molecules ar its surface become fluid until the ice’s temperature increases to 0C. While the ‘melting’ temperature of ice can be lowered by applying a significant pressure upon the surface, the slight variation of the earth’s atmospheric pressure is not sufficient to produce a measurable melting temperature change.
You just wrote: “The world if full of vague nitwits who manage to extract a of limitless supply of confidence from truth they are never able to enunciate.” Galileo recognized long ago: “We (professors) cannot teach people anything; we can only help them discover it within themselves.” The student can blame the professor for the lack of ability to ‘enunciate’ but the fact is that only the student can learn. The professor, as acknowledged by Galileo, cannot learn the student. I claim to understand much of what I read that Galileo wrote, but I do not claim to understand much that Richard Feynman wrote in the Feynman that is based upon mathematical reasoning because I do not have((nor do many other physicists I suspect) the mathematical skills that Feynman had. But here and there I can understand the ‘qualitative’ results of his mathematical reasoning. Which because of his actual achievements I believed to be correct.
So, I ask you: Are you the nitwit who cannot understand (find in yourself) Pauling’s understanding of hydrogen bonding? For many of us nitwits do believe that his ideas of hydrogen bonding do explain so many observations beyond the physical properties of water.
Have a good day, Jerry
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James McGinn
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Jerry:
I started viewing one of your links which claims that it is not known: Why is water, or any liquid, still a fluid?
JMcG:
Wrong. You failed to grasp the (subtle) distinction between a substance being a liquid because of regular “Coulomb” forces and a substance being a liquid because of polarity, which is the case with H2O (likewise with NH3 and HF).
The inability to make this distinction and (more accurately) the stubborn laziness to maintain this distinction is, ultimately, the root of the erroneous thinking that began with Pauling’s Omission:
Pauling’s Omission: The Original Sin of the Natural Sciences
James McGinn / Solving Tornadoes
The answer is, regardless of the possible intermolecular attractions involved between molecules, temperature is a measure of the average kinetic energy of each of the 6.023 X 10^23 molecules of water in 18ml of liquid water.
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jerry krause
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Hi James,
Wrong!! See, even I can write this word.
Have a good day, Jerry
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James McGinn
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Jerry:
I started viewing one of your links which claims that it is not known: Why is water, or any liquid, still a fluid? The answer is, regardless of the possible intermolecular attractions involved between molecules,
JMcG:
My point, you simpleton, is that the intermolecular forces associated with H bonding and those associated with the more typical Coulomb forces are categorically and FUNCTIONALLY distinct, as I described. The purpose of my videos was to make this distinction so explicit that even a moron couldn’t miss it. As per your response here, Obviously I failed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIQSubWJeNg
James McGinn / Solving Tornadoes
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