Journalists are drawn to the notion that greenhouse gas
emissions increase the human toll from extreme events like
Ulysses was drawn to the sirens. The connection between the two
is made despite a robust scientific consensus -- and lack of
evidence to the contrary -- that no signal beyond increasing
societal vulnerability has been detected in increasing disaster
losses, much less attributed to the effects of accumulating
greenhouse gases. A particularly egregious example of this sort
of journalism comes from Time's Bryan Walsh, who writes: The
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has said that warming
is, on the whole, likely to increase intense rain and snowfall,
leading to more catastrophic floods like the ones we're seeing
in Pakistan. But the heartbreaking Asian floods should be one
more reminder of the need to put the world on a path to lower
carbon emissions—before the weather reaches extremes that no one
can handle.