An October 21 article in Bloomberg claims that Climate Change is Killing Buildings in Slow Motion. This is demonstrably false, as buildings have been affected by weather for millennia, not just during the present. This is a classic case of conflation of weather and climate, used to push the idea that a “climate crisis” is a clear and present danger, when, in fact, there is no such thing as a climate crisis occurring, except in the imaginations climate alarmists and the mainstream media that seemingly blindly accepts and publicizes their every pronouncement.
First, it should be noted that science says climate and weather are not the same things. Weather is what we (and buildings) experience on a day-to-day basis. Climate is a mathematical average of weather parameters such as temperature and rainfall over a 30-year period. Climate does not act as a tangible atmospheric phenomenon that can deteriorate buildings – weather does.
Weather has been deteriorating buildings since mankind has been building them. Only recently has the focus switched from blaming weather for deteriorating infrastructure and falsely blaming climate instead.
For example, some recent Climate Realism (CR) articles take issue with similar absurd claims made by the media. In No, New York Times, Climate Change Isn’t Destroying Bridges, CR finds that climate had no role at all in the collapse of the bridge discussed, and neither did weather as the actual cause had nothing to do with climate change at all but rather an engineering failure that used undersized gusset plates that were too thin for the load of the bridge that was overloaded at the time of collapse.
In another case, Dear HuffPo: City Schools Suffer from Aging Buildings, NOT Climate Change, CR points out that “City schools in the Northeastern Unites States may well be suffering from lost school days because their buildings have insufficient HVAC systems, along with a slew of other issues that come along with aging structures.”
Infrastructure naturally ages with time. Things wear out and break. Climate change has not had any impact on that process.
While Bloomberg jumps to the absurd conclusion that climate change is the culprit in a collection of unrelated building failures, the fact is that weather, age, and poor design or maintenance are the combined forces at hand.
When confronted with such logic, climate alarmists often then point to claims that climate change is making the weather worse. But this is false. Data shows weather has not worsened in any measurable sense. CR pointed this out responding to an article in Forbes, titled Forbes is Right That Weather Isn’t Getting More Extreme, Wrong About Other Climate Claims. CR has dozens of other articles pointing out media failures in trying to link weather events (and subsequent destruction) to climate change.
Most importantly, climate science itself says the weather is not getting worse. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) shows clearly that there is no linkage to climate change at all. Figure 1 below shows Table 12.12 on Page 90 – Chapter 12 of the UN IPCC Sixth Assessment Report. Emergence of Climate Impact Drivers (CIDs). The color corresponds to the confidence of the region with the highest confidence: white colors indicate where evidence of a climate change signal is lacking or the signal is not present, leading to overall low confidence of an emerging signal.
Clearly, the data doesn’t support worsening weather, rendering claims of climate enhanced weather events destroying infrastructure totally moot.
This shameful rush by the media to blame climate change for every social ill and problem society faces is part of a misguided pattern Climate Realism has discussed time and again . Almost without fail, when there is some oddball or unique event somewhere in the world, climate alarmists and the media immediately rush to blame it on climate change whether they have any facts to support it or not. Such behavior is irresponsible journalism.
