Thongchai Thailand

The claim that “when it comes to weather related disasters then there is a trend upwards connected with climate change” (UN warns of mega disaster, Bangkok Post, June 7, 2010) has been made so many times since Hurricane Katrina in 2005 that it has taken on the aura of truth and it has been cited by world leaders including Obama but in fact there is no actual evidence to support it and the authors of the original IPCC report on this topic have since recanted. The 2% per year increase from 1970 to 2005 in losses from weather related disasters due to global warming that they had once reported turned out to be an artifact of the 2004 and 2005 hurricane seasons. It is a case of spurious statistics sold to the public as scientific fact. A recent article in the Sunday Times (“UN wrongly linked global warming to natural disasters”, ST, January 24, 2010) summarizes the evolution of this bit of climate change fiction.

Cha-am Jamal, Thailand