Last month, the Securities and Exchange Commission released a new rule for public comment that would require public companies to report the climate-related impact of their businesses. Since it has been well established in multiple IPCC reports that the human impact on climate has never been observed, only modeled, this seems unnecessary.
The climate models used by the IPCC and NOAA to “compute” the human impact on climate have already been invalidated by Drs. Ross McKitrick and John Christy in their well-known Earth and Space Science peer-reviewed paper. In fact, McKitrick and Christy’s paper is cited numerous times in the latest IPCC report, called AR6, which acknowledges the point. It also admits that one likely reason is that the models are overestimating the sensitivity of the climate to carbon dioxide, and that the models are overestimating warming relative to observations in both the atmosphere and the oceans.
The SEC proposed rule erroneously gives the impression that destructive climate events are increasing in frequency. This is not so. Since 2000, as data from EM-DAT shows, climate-related natural disasters are down overall. Extreme weather events, wildfires, landslides, and droughts were all less common in 2019 than they had been in 2000. The number of annual floods peaked over 200 around 2006 and has never since attained that level again. The climate, in fact, is becoming milder as it warms, with fewer extremes and therefore fewer severe storms.
There is another problem here. Climate is usually defined as a change in average weather over a period of 30 years or more. This means that all the years the SEC rule cites as having increased billion-dollar climate related disasters, because they are part of a period less than 30 years, are just weather events, not climate. Moreover, the SEC’s billion-dollar disaster-events count fails to take into account population or GDP growth. Weather damage, as a percentage of GDP, has declined over climate-length periods of time, as Professor Roger Pielke Jr. has shown. And annual climate-related deaths are down more than 90% since 1920.
The SEC document claims that: “the impact of climate-related risks on both individual businesses and the financial system as a whole are well documented.” This does not seem to be the case. Recent research by Professor Roger Pielke Jr., Dr. Bjorn Lomborg, and data from the EM-DAT disaster database all show the impact of climate change, both of natural and human origin, is declining.
Another problem with the documentation of climate events is that they fail to argue persuasively that the mild warming since the 20 century is harmful. Cold kills many more people than heat, and there were many very cold and deadly years in the Twentieth Century. The coldest years in the U.S. were 1985, 1899, 1977, and 1983. In the U.K. 1963, 1947, 1940 and 1979 stand out. Our current climate is far less harsh.
When considering the horrible suffering of people in the Northern Hemisphere during the Little Ice Age due to cold and drought, one should not just assume that a warmer climate is worse than a colder one. During the Little Ice Age, cold and a lack of food led people to conduct horrible persecutions of Jews and “witches” in an effort to find a scapegoat.
As Wolfgang Behringer has noted, some people are determined to blame someone, or even just humanity’s sins in general, for natural disasters. We should not make the mistake of blaming humanity or sin for floods, droughts, and other natural disasters without clear proof. For now, the claim is doubtful, coming as it does from computer models that have been exposed as inadequate.
It seems that the SEC is accepting the politically correct dogma that warmer is bad, without demanding and evidence that it really is. This is no way to make policy.
Andy May is a member and contributing writer for the CO2 Coalition of Arlington, Virginia. He is a geologist and author of The Great Climate Change Debate: Karoly v Happer and Blood and Honor: The People of Bleeding Kansas.
