Another climate FAIL. Add this to tornadoes and hurricanes not being linked either, and you find that the entire Joe Romm / Bill McKibben alarming industrial complex of doubtful linkages between weather and climate has pretty much collapsed.

From the article:

The USGS study — titled “Has the magnitude of floods across the USA changed with global CO2 levels” — found no clear relationship between the increase in greenhouse gas emissions blamed for climate change and the severity of flooding in three of four regions of the United States.

There is “virtually no evidence of increases or decreases in flood magnitudes” during the last 100 years in the northwestern and southeastern United States, USGS said. The study found that the northeastern United States “shows a tendency towards increases in flooding over this period.”

UPDATE: Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. writes that “This adds to a pile of research that shows similar results around the world. ”

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Hydrological Sciences Journal

Has the magnitude of floods across the USA changed with global CO 2 levels? DOI: 10.1080/02626667.2011.621895 R. M. Hirscha* & K. R. Rybergb Available online: 24 Oct 2011

Abstract

Statistical relationships between annual floods at 200 long-term (85–127 years of record) streamgauges in the coterminous United States and the global mean carbon dioxide concentration (GMCO2) record are explored. The streamgauge locations are limited to those with little or no regulation or urban development. The coterminous US is divided into four large regions and stationary bootstrapping is used to evaluate if the patterns of these statistical associations are significantly different from what would be expected under the null hypothesis that flood magnitudes are independent of GMCO2. In none of the four regions defined in this study is there strong statistical evidence for flood magnitudes increasing with increasing GMCO2. One region, the southwest, showed a statistically significant negative relationship between GMCO2 and flood magnitudes. The statistical methods applied compensate both for the inter-site correlation of flood magnitudes and the shorter-term (up to a few decades) serial correlation of floods.

Citation Hirsch, R.M. and Ryberg, K.R., 2012. Has the magnitude of floods across the USA changed with global CO 2 levels? Hydrolological Sciences Journal, doi: 10.1080/02626667.2011.621895.

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