The automatic assumption is now that weather-related natural disasters are linked to climate change. Politicians and administrators are quick to blame global warming, partly todistract attention from human incompetence. Two recent examples illustrate the point.
The terrible floods in Tabasco, Mexico have left 80% of the province under water. 800,000 people have lost their homes. All crops have been lost. Many places are flooded to a depth of 2m and it will be weeks before the water recedes.
40cm of rain fell in three days, almost twice the monthly average for October. The president of Mexico was quick to blame global warming for the deluge. But this part of the country is low-lying and has had very severe floods in the past. The severity of this episode may have arisen as much from the mismanagement of the local hydro-electric power plants as from climate change.
The Californian wildfires destroyed about 600,000 acres of woodland. The cost of repair will be over $1bn. State authorities blamed the strong Santa Ana winds (possibly connected to climate change), high temperatures, and the prevailing drought. The reality is more complex: American fire losses are tending to rise, but the California fires were more to do with poor forest management practices over the last decades than ‘global warming’. Parts of California have had very little water this year, but North America regularly suffers from water shortages and this year’s drought is no worse than at several other times in the last hundred years.
Climate change will almost certainly bring far higher temperatures, more drought, greater numbers of extreme rainstorms, rising sea levels and increased winds. But in the case of some recent catastrophes, the evidence to link the disaster to global warming is thin or debatable. Politicians and administrators worried that blame will be attached to them for past inaction are far too ready to shift responsibility to an amorphous global force. News media are very willing to fall unquestioningly in line. This sloppiness gives easy targets to the global warming deniers and makes generating international action more difficult, not less.
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