Article content continued

The case against a climate 'emergency' is in the reports

The report goes on to point out that there is a decreasing trend in droughts in central North America.

Precipitation: “In summary, confidence in precipitation change averaged over global land areas is low for the years prior to 1950 and medium afterwards because of insufficient data, particularly in the earlier part of the record. Available globally incomplete records show mixed and non-significant long-term trends in reported global mean changes. Further, when virtually all the land area is filled in using a reconstruction method, the resulting time series shows less change in land-based precipitation since 1900.” (p. 202 )

Extreme precipitation: “(It) is likely that since 1951 there have been statistically significant increases in the number of heavy precipitation events (e.g., above the 95th percentile) in more regions than there have been statistically significant decreases, but there are strong regional and subregional variations in the trends. In particular, many regions present statistically non-significant or negative trends, and, where seasonal changes have been assessed, there are also variations between seasons.” (pp. 213-14)

Additionally, Environment Canada continues to maintain that “the observational record has not yet shown evidence of consistent changes in short-duration precipitation extremes across (Canada).”

Here is what the IPCC said about tornado trends in its 2012 report: “There is low confidence in observed trends in small-scale phenomena such as tornadoes and hail because of data inhomogeneities and inadequacies in monitoring systems.” (p. 151). They went on to say they don’t know if there is a connection with greenhouse gases because some changes could increase conditions conducive to tornado formation and others could decrease them.