Journal Of Climate Change: Last 15 Years, Netherlands Has Seen The Fewest Number Of Storms Since Records Began

At Der Spiegel Axel Bojanowski writes a story about a study appearing in the journal Climate Change:  A 101 year record of windstorms in the Netherlands.

The results of the study are revealing. Let us recall that in Germany and within many circles of “experts” the prevailing wisdom is that man-made global warming is leading to more frequent and more severe storms. However, this new study shows that this is a myth. The study’s abstract concludes:

The Netherlands is currently experiencing the minimum aggregate storm damage of the past 100 years, though only slightly lower than a quiet period of 50 years ago.”

And Der Spiegel writes:

Prognosticated climate warming produced fears of more frequent storm surges and flooding. Especially the Netherlands was threatened. Because much of the country is below sea level – higher dikes would be needed to protect the country. However these worries are shown to be baseless a new study in the journal ‘Climate Change’ shows: According to the statistics, the Netherlands is experiencing fewer and fewer storm surges.”

Since systematic records have been kept starting 101 years ago, never have there been fewer storms than in the last 15 years, reports Stephen Cusack of the private research institute ‘Risk Management Solutions’ in London. Not only storms as a whole, but also storms with heavy damages have greatly reduced.”

Now those are results that completely contradict everything special interests like the re-insurance industry have been telling us.

Solar or ocean related?

The abstract provides another interesting observation (my emphasis):

The resulting windstorm loss time-series for the Netherlands contains some interesting features. Annual losses are stable over the whole period and have a dominant cycle with a period of about 50 years.”

The study also says that weak storms were more frequent during the previous lull 50 years ago and that the current lull is somewhat different in character. The journal suspects that this may be due to “a different mix of climate forcing mechanisms in modern times compared to 50 years ago.”

This ought not be a surprise, though. Weather is chaotic and it would be indeed foolish to assume that weather duplicates itself. Change is a natural process. It only proves that climate changes – like it’s supposed to!