Until National Review Online posted about this scary story from enviro mag Grist, I wasn’t aware of this frightening new dimension to the catastrophic effect global warming climate change is having.
Already, 2011 is the costliest year for insurance claims due to natural disasters, aided by climate change. The cost so far: $265 billion, greater than the previous record, set in the Hurricane Katrina year of 2005.
The scary facts from Grist on how climate change causes natural disasters
Well, except for that $210 billion from the Japanese tsunami caused by that monster earthquake, which National Review Online pointed out in a bit of elementary arithmetic.
Add in the $20 billion caused by the New Zealand earthquake, and the total damages that could have even theoretically caused by climate change melts faster than an ice floe in an Al Gore movie, to at most $35 billion. And that’s if you believe all the damage was caused by climate change, which not even the most hard-core warmists would argue.
Hard to believe, but this pixilated story was even worse before NRO wrote about it. The headline originally blamed the disasters on climate change.
Grist's original headline lingers on
While Grist changed the headline after its mocking by National Review, it didn’t correct the story’s phony correlation. And the original bogus premise is retained in the story’s URL:
Grist's original bogus headline remains in the URL
Pretty clever of Grist. Just change “climate disasters” to “natural disasters” in the headline but keep the story with its false premise. Why quibble about mere factual accuracy when the fate of Gaia hangs in the balance?
Grist has tried before to blame tsunamis on climate change, only to back down with a mealy-mouthed apology that demonstrates how far its partisans will go to twist the facts to fit their beliefs:
“The intent of this piece isn’t to attribute today’s tragedy to climate change. Apologies to those whom I misled with the headline. It was meant literally, as in: Tsunamis are inundations of shorelines and therefore have impacts that resemble storm surges, which are one of the most immediate threats of a warmer planet. In addition, climate change may cause tsunamis directly, so it’s possible we’ll someday see more images like this as a result.”
Climate scares proven bogus because of inaccurate assumptions long ago became monotonous. But for skeptics of man-caused catastrophic global warming climate change climate instability like myself, Grist is the self-parodying gift that keeps on giving.
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(DISCLAIMER: This is my opinion, and not necessarily that of my employer, the North County Times).