The Climate Non-Problem…Major Aspects Of Japan’s Climate Have Seen No Change In 100 Years

By Kirye in Tokyo

In Japan we often hear about “climate change” and how citizens are told by their elected officials that it is necessary to act quickly to combat it.

Leaders worldwide want to have trillions of already scarce dollars to “mitigate climate change”.

But what if there hasn’t been any real changes in climate and so really nothing much to mitigate, except changes that exist only in models?

What if the changes that have been taking place are all within the range of natural variability? Does it really make any sense to risk bankrupting the planet to fight a problem that doesn’t really exist?

In my home country of Japan we also keep hearing how our own weather is becoming more extreme and storms more intense because of rising CO2. Yet, when we look at the statistics for Japan over the past decades, we see some very surprising developments.

Precipitation over the past 100 years

Firstly, annual precipitation in Japan has not seen any trend change – in 100 years.

Completely flat annual precipitation trend for Japan over the past 100 years. Where’s the climate change? Source: www.data.jma.html

As the chart above shows, there hasn’t been very many extremes over the past 2 decades. Precipitation has been quite steady for more than a decade. Japan saw a wetter period during the 1950s than what we have seen in the 2010s. The 1970s and 80s were marked by much variability.

No rise in landfalling typhoons

As mentioned earlier, alarmists and media like telling the public that storm activity has been increasing as well. But again the data do not show this. Like hurricanes and tornadoes in the US, or cyclones globally, typhoons making landfall in Japan have also not been increasing:

No trend. Data source: www.data.jma.html

The Japanese Meteorology Agency has been keeping records on typhoons since 1951. As the chart above shows, there’s been no trend over the past seven decades. Is this “change” that needs to be combatted?

In terms of typhoons and precipitation, it seems we are fighting — at a gigantic expense — changes that don’t even exist.

Very little sea level rise

Japan is an island country, and so sea level rise is an important issue. Yet, even sea level around Japan is not much different than it was in 1950:

Sea levels around Japan were almost just as high 70 years ago as they are today, according to the meticulous data of the JMA.

Temperature abrupt jump

Finally we look at Japan’s mean annual temperature. Though it has risen almost 1°C over the past century, here we observe that there has not been any change over the past two decades.

Source: JMA.

The chart above has some notable features. Namely, annual temperatures from 1951 to the mid 1980s were flat, even cooling a bit. Why wasn’t “greenhouse gas” CO2 driving the temperatures up? Was it taking time off?

Very poor correlation

Then at the very end of the 1980s, in just a matter  of a couple of years, the temperature literally jumped to a whole new plateau, but it has not climbed much ever since. What’s going on here?

Does CO2 take 30 years off, work for a couple of years, and then disappear for another 30 years again? The correlation between CO2 and Japan mean annual temperature is very poor.

The abrupt jump at the end of the 1980s likely had something to do with natural oceanic cycles.

In summary, major aspects of the Japanese climate have seen no trend change over the past 100 years, and the temperature increase hardly appears to have much to do with CO2.
=======================================================

Pierre contributed to this post