Major Extreme Climatic Events in China: 1956-2009

Authors Ren et al. (2011) defined an Integrated Extreme Climatic Index (IECI) for the purpose of analyzing the overall trend of changes in the frequencies of major extreme climatic events over mainland China. This index is composed of seven individual extreme indicators: the country-averaged frequencies of high temperature, low temperature, intense precipitation, dust storms, strong wind events, meteorological drought area percentage, and number of land-falling tropical cyclones. And the final integrated index was defined as the weighted sums of the standardized individual extreme climatic indices, where the weights given each indicator are based on the annual mean economic losses and deaths caused by disasters associated with the extreme climate events over the period 2004-2008. So what did the index reveal?

Ren et al. note, first of all, that the relative importance of meteorological disasters for China as given in their paper "is generally supported by historical records from past decades (Wen and Ding, 2008) and by the common perception of the public (Gao, 1997; Wen and Ding, 2008)." And with this background they say their analysis covering the period 1956-2009 shows that "in the context of significant global warming, the frequencies of the most harmful extreme climate events in mainland China have either significantly decreased or only marginally significantly increased, leading to an insignificant long-term trend in the IECI series."

Given such findings, it is clear, at least for a very large portion of the planet, that the climate-alarmist claim that global warming leads to more extreme and destructive meteorological phenomena does not hold true over the period of time when they claim that the world warmed at a rate and to a level that were both unprecedented over the past millennium or two, adding another resounding defeat to their unenviable track record of dire predictions gone wrong.

Additional References
Gao, W. 1997. History of Natural Disasters in China. Seismological Press, Beijing, China.

Wen, K.G. and Ding, Y.H. 2008. China Meteorological Disasters. China Meteorological Press, Beijing, China.