Asia on The Verge

The Verge recently exclaimed, “Asia is officially the most ‘disaster-prone’ region in the world.”

“From heatwaves to flooding and storms, climate change makes all kinds of disasters more intense all over the world,” they scream.

Heatwaves aside, not so fast, per

Roger Pielke Jr.

¹ and the IPCC.

Disasters are awful — people die and are displaced, property and infrastructure is damaged and destroyed, and economies can be compromised. Planet Earth is a place of extremes. Hurricanes, floods, drought, heat waves and other types of extreme events are normal and always have been.

But to be sure, the prospect of human-caused climate change holds the potential for making extreme events more common or worse. For instance, there is already good evidence that heat waves have become more intense in many places and that increase is attributable to increasing greenhouse gases. However, for most types of weather and climate extremes neither detection of trends nor attribution of trends to human climate forcings has been achieved.

Don’t take it from me, take it from the IPCC.

The Verge further state, “But the problem is particularly acute in Asia, which is heating up faster than the global average thanks to greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels.”

Ironically The Verge, being huge proponents of things such as EVs and fiat energy, have still failed to make the connection these “climate solutions” largely depend on Asia. But that’s a topic for another time.

They’re getting this hysteria from a report from the World Meteorological Organization, a United Nations agency, entitled, State of the Climate in Asia.

Given this document is supposed to be about climate change, some of the points they try to make appear to be closer to weather.

Such as precipitation figures for a region in China for the calendar year of 2023 alone.

South-west China suffered from a drought, with below-normal precipitation levels nearly every month of 2023.

And:

Essential winter precipitation was also below normal in the Hindu Kush region, and the rains associated with the Indian summer monsoon were insufficient.

Terms such as “essential winter precipitation” and “insufficient” in the context of Indian monsoon rains remains undefined, but apparently, we’re all supposed to panic about these events in such a relatively short period of time.

They give another tidbit:

In 2023, over 80% of reported hydrometeorological hazards in Asia were flood and storm events. Yemen suffered heavy rainfall and resulting widespread floods, with over 30 reported casualties and over 165,000 individuals affected in over 70 districts.

Whatever “reported hydrometeorological hazard” means aside, Yemen is a developing country thats been in a civil war for a decade. Heavy rainfall in a developed nation or highly developing nation is more than often a nothingburger compared to that same event in one under war or poorly developed.

They add another “point.”

Overall, the 79 reported hydrometeorological hazard events in 2023 led to over 2 000 fatalities and impacted more than 9 million people.

But they fail to tell us how many reported hydrometeorological hazard events occurred in total and over what time period. Two-thousand deaths? That’s a few years of fentanyl overdoses in California.

So, is this really news?

The “borders” of Asia may not be as straightforward as Antarctica, or North and South America, but they’re generally encompass somewhere starting from the Western Russia to most of the ex Soviet territories ending in “Stan,” the Middle East, India, Vietnam, and down to Island nations such as Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines, and finally closing off with China, Korea, and Japan. - back up in this part of China and Northern-most Japan is still Russia - which extends almost to Alaska.

Going off these rough boundaries, Asia is a geographical area that consists of just shy of 30 percent all land in the world and almost 60 percent of global population. This area also encompasses virtually all climates from tropical jungles at the tropics to deserts, and tundras.

Asia is home to the top three most populated cities in the world, Tokyo, Delhi, and Shanghai and many of the other most populated cities are on the list of top 10, 20, or 30. But just those three cities alone (excluding adjacent cities and towns) consist of almost one third the entire US population. Many of Asia’s other megacities, including Delhi contain millions of people who live in what could be considered developing world conditions. Another way to put this is they live in slums - where services such as electricity, water, wastewater, and garbage collection may be intermittent, ineffective, or non existent.

This means that any severe weather event, or anything attributed to “climate crisis”, is likely to cause severe damage to human lives and property and there’s a decent chance it’s likely to occur on a landmass that consists of a significant portion of the world’s landmass and even more of the human population.

1. Don't Believe the Hype