Arkansas Floods, Texas Temperatures, and Global Warming

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People ask me all the time, as recently as last week, why I don't write more about 'global warming.' It is because I dislike the topic. There is so much bad science involved with global warming and I prefer to write positive things about good science (such as Warnings).

I suppose it was inevitable that someone would try to use the flash flood tragedy in Arkansas last week to advance the argument for global warming.  Sure enough, from The Washington Post: 
However, the question of whether to raise climate change in discussions of flash floods (and other extreme events) constitutes more than a quibble over semantics. The media has a responsibility to report what the science says, even in the context of a breaking news story, such as a flood event or heat wave. The science has become clearer, although by no means certain, that local precipitation extremes may be connected to climate change.

The author, Andrew Freedman, wants us to believe that last week's flash floods in Arkansas were caused by 'global warming.' As Dr. Roger Pielke pointed out in his response to Mr. Freedman's piece, flash flood deaths are going down in spite of increasing population.
Courtesy: NOAA via Dr. Roger Pielke, Jr. 

The deaths needn't have occurred last week: There was timely warning and a siren at the campground would have allowed an orderly evacuation. The deaths made so much news because they are now so rare!


And, via Anthony Watts, there is the Texas A&M professor who made this comment Tuesday,
It is not just Texas; it is global. The rising temperatures that have afflicted the state are only part of a larger problem.
The professor goes on to talk about the problems associated with the alleged temperature rise. Only one problem, temperatures are not rising in Texas as the graph below indicates.
This hits home for me because we have the same thing in my home state of Kansas: University researchers confidently stating "temperatures are rising" in Kansas when the data shows no such thing.

So, when your local newspaper carries yet another story about the apocalyptic effects of global warming, take it with a grain of salt.

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