Guest essay by Eric Worrall

Can you tell what the previous year’s weather was like, by reading the latest climate science doomsday press releases?

More rainy days from climate change could dampen economic growth: Study

Scientists examined 40 years of data from more than 1,500 global regions.

ByDaniel Manzo
13 January 2022, 04:32

More rainy days and extreme rainfall likely will hurt global economies, according to new research from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.

“This is about prosperity — and ultimately about people’s jobs,” Leonie Wenz, a lead scientist, told ABC News. “Economies across the world are slowed down by more wet days and extreme daily rainfall, an important insight that adds to our growing understanding of the true costs of climate change.”

“We know from previous work that flooding associated with extreme rainfall can damage infrastructure, which is critical to economic productivity, and also cause local disruptions to production,” said Wenz, adding that the new findings also suggest everyday disruptions caused by more rain will have “a disruptive effect on businesses, manufacturing, transportation.”

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“Intensified daily rainfall turns out to be bad, especially for wealthy, industrialized countries like the U.S., Japan or Germany,” Wenz said. But smaller, more agrarian economies can see some benefits.

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Read more: https://abcnews.go.com/Business/rainy-days-climate-change-dampen-economic-growth-study/story?id=82185377

The abstract of the study;

Published: 12 January 2022

The effect of rainfall changes on economic production

Maximilian Kotz, Anders Levermann & Leonie Wenz 

Nature volume 601, pages 223–227 (2022)Cite this article

Abstract

Macro-economic assessments of climate impacts lack an analysis of the distribution of daily rainfall, which can resolve both complex societal impact channels and anthropogenically forced changes^1,2,3,4,5,6. Here, using a global panel of subnational economic output for 1,554 regions worldwide over the past 40 years, we show that economic growth rates are reduced by increases in the number of wet days and in extreme daily rainfall, in addition to responding nonlinearly to the total annual and to the standardized monthly deviations of rainfall. Furthermore, high-income nations and the services and manufacturing sectors are most strongly hindered by both measures of daily rainfall, complementing previous work that emphasized the beneficial effects of additional total annual rainfall in low-income, agriculturally dependent economies^4,7. By assessing the distribution of rainfall at multiple timescales and the effects on different sectors, we uncover channels through which climatic conditions can affect the economy. These results suggest that anthropogenic intensification of daily rainfall extremes^8,9,10 will have negative global economic consequences that require further assessment by those who wish to evaluate the costs of anthropogenic climate change.

Read more: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-04283-8

Last year the problem was drought;

Climate change and droughts: What’s the connection?

As average temperatures continue to climb, drought has become a permanent part of our vocabulary.

by TIFFANY MEANS AUGUST 18, 2021

For tens of millions of Americans, drought has become an ever-present natural disaster.

Events such as the moderate-to-extreme drought conditions that covered more than half of the mainland U.S. in 2012, the megadrought in the West that continues today, and summer 2021’s record-low water levels at Lake Mead have kept dry spells in the news spotlight and kept drought impacts – strict water conservation measures, crop failures, and fears that dried-up vegetation will spark dangerous wildfires – on people’s minds.

That’s particularly true in the Western United States. Because of the West’s largely semi-arid and desert climates, droughts are natural occurrences across the region. However, regional climate isn’t the only culprit in drought activity. Climate change, namely rising average temperatures driven by human-generated emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases, is contributing to droughts, too.

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Read more: https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2021/08/climate-change-and-droughts-whats-the-connection/

Of course, CO2 is each way bet when it comes to extreme weather. Climate scientists probably feel no contradiction trying to attach their narrative to contradictory weather events. Every kind of bad weather is evidence that the demon molecule is cooking the world, including extreme cold and snow events.

via Watts Up With That?

January 13, 2022

Drought No More: Climate Change Now Causes Too Much Rain