A high priest of the Church of Global Warming. |
Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury, now a high priest of the Church of Global Warming, has given his blessings to the IPCC:
“We have heard for years the predictions that the uncontrolled burning of fossil fuels will lead to an accelerated warming of the Earth. What is now happening indicates that these predictions are coming true; our actions have had consequences that are deeply threatening for many of the poorest communities in the world.“Rich, industrialised countries, including our own, have unquestionably contributed most to atmospheric pollution. Both our present lifestyle and the industrial history of how we created such possibilities for ourselves have to bear the responsibility for pushing the environment in which we live towards crisis.”
Dr Williams, writing in his capacity as chairman of Christian Aid, said that the winter storms that battered Britain had brought climate change to the fore in this country and that the IPCC report publishedat a specially convened meeting in Yokohama in Japan tomorrow puts “our local problems into a deeply disturbing global context”.
The IPCC, he says, will be “pointing out that … we [the UK] have in fact got off relatively lightly in comparison with others”.
While the “chaos [of the flood] came as a shock to many”, other countries in the developing world such as Bangladesh and Kenya among others had suffered far worse catastrophes caused by climate change over many years.
Rowan Williams should read what Dr. Roger Pielke Jr, one of the foremost authorities on the relationship between climate change and floods/storms, has written:
It is wrong to claim that disasters associated with hurricanes, tornadoes, or floods have increased on climate timescales either in the United States or globally. Hurricanes have not increased in the U.S. in frequency, intensity, or damage since at least 1900. The same holds for tropical cyclones globally since at least 1970 (at which point the data became available to allow for a global perspective).
Floods in the U.S. have not increased in frequency or intensity since at least 1950. Indeed, flood losses as a percentage of U.S. GDP have dropped by about 75 percent since 1940. At the global scale there is a similar lack of evidence for upwards trends in floods. Tornadoes have not increased in frequency, intensity or normalized damage in the U.S. since 1950, and there is some evidence to suggest that they have actually declined.
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