Pompeii: lava in the living room…

Politicians and the media love to bleat about disasters getting bigger, badder, worser (© George Negus), etc., without actually providing any evidence, but as Andrew Bolt points out, our perception is skewed because we’re building more stuff in dumb places.

We build houses on flood plains and then are surprised when we get flooded. We build houses on the seafront and are surprised when a cyclone brings a storm surge. As George Carlin famously said, we build houses on the slopes of active volcanoes and then wonder why we have lava in the living room…! The unfortunate inhabitants of Pompeii learnt their lesson in AD 79, but we still haven’t learnt ours in AD 2011.

From The Australian’s Cut & Paste:

Ross Gittins in The Sydney Morning Herald on Wednesday:

SCIENTISTS have long predicted one effect of global warming would be for extreme events to become more extreme, which is just what seems to be happening. And, certainly, the insurance industry, which keeps careful records of these events, is in no doubt that climate change is making things worse.

ABC1’s Lateline on Wednesday:

REPORTER Margot O’Neill : Australia’s climate seemed to flip into overdrive this summer. So, are these extremes the new normal? It’s what climate change models have been predicting, after all. Big international insurers are mopping up after more than 850 global weather catastrophes in 2010, and they say there’s no doubt: global warming is destabilising the climate.

Peer-reviewed paper by Eric Neumayer and Fabian Barthe of London School of Economics and funded by re-insurers Munich Re in Global Environmental Change, November 18, 2010:

APPLYING both [conventional and alternative] methods to the most comprehensive existing global dataset of natural disaster loss [provided by Munich Re], in general we find no significant upward trends in normalised disaster damage over the period 1980-2009 globally, regionally, for specific disasters or for specific disasters in specific regions. (source)

Munich Re (or Moonbat Re as they should be called, see here and here) is firmly ensconced on the climate alarmist bandwagon. They must be spitting chips that their hard earned dollars were spent on a report that gave them the wrong answer… oops.