by Dennis T: Avery (NAPSA)—After the recent horrifying tsunami wavehit the Indian Ocean, a colleague warned me that environmental activists would move quickly to blameit on global warming. I laughed. “How could they blame an earthquake event that hits a region about once every 200 years on modern CO2 emissions,” I asked? I didn’t have long to wonder. The very next day, Stephen Tindale, executive director of Greenpeace in the United Kingdom, told an interDennis T. Avery viewer, “No one can ignore the relentless increase in extreme weather events and so-called natural disasters, which in reality are no more natural than plastic Christmastree.” The last transoceanic tsunami in Southeast Asia occurred in 1883. In that event, an Indone- sian volcano called Krakatoa blew up. The resulting killer wave drowned 36,000 people, while darkened skies lowered world temperatures for five years. But no one blamed the eruption of Krakatoa on humans burning coal oil lamps. Greenpeace’s “relentless increase in extreme weather events” has never happened. “Storminess” in North America has been declining for the past 50 year—not despite warmer temperatures, but because of them. The number of hurricanes, “thunder days,” hailstorms, East Coast storms, and Canadian blizzards haveall been dropping. Storms get their power from the temperature differential between the poles and the equator. Global warming raises temperatures at the poles much more than at the equator. That narrows the polar-equator temperature differential, so we get fewer, milder storms. Four hurricanes hit America this fall, but NASA reports a decline in land-falling Atlantic hurricanes during the past 50 years. Four in a year was just our annualroll of the dice. What we've had, instead, is a relentless increase in extreme weather claims, driven by Greenpeace and their Blame People First campaign. The physical evidence of past climate changes reassures us that these claims are bogus. Ice cores, cave stalagmites and seabed sedi- ments say we’ve had about 600 natural, moderate, solar-driven warmingsin the last million years. The warmings, and the coolings that follow, come in 1500year cycles. Satellites now monitor the mild variation in the sun’s irradiance. Temperatures were higher than today during the Medieval Warming of the 10th to 13th centuries— and the weather was the best in history. There were fewer and weaker storms during that period. Greenpeace doesn’t want us to realize that the Medieval Warming and the Little Ice Age were the two halves of the world’s most recent, natural 1500-yearclimatecycle. The earthquake that caused the giant tsunamiis the epitome of a natural disaster. The world should focus on 1) how to help the affected countries and how to stop the spread of contaminated water diseases and 2) improving the earthquake warning system, even though it may well be another 150 years before the ocean floor starts another killer chain of events. Dennis T. Avery is a former State Department agriculture analyst and a Senior Fellow at The Hudson Institute in the nation’s capital.
