The Kansas City Star ran an opinion piece claiming climate change is already making weather more extreme in Kansas and Missouri. This is false.
There is no data supporting the claim that either flooding or drought, two specific extreme weather events cited in the story are worse now than they have been historically. [emphasis, links added]
Almost all the records for such events in both states were set nearly a century or more ago when global average temperatures were cooler.
Joel Mathis, the writer of the Kansas City Star story, “We’re watching the climate change in Kansas and Missouri. Why don’t more of us care?” opines:
Climate change is already taking a toll on Kansas and Missouri, and not just in the form of wintertime vegetation. Both states are enduring long-running droughts that have challenged the region’s farmers and forced some communities to start hoarding their drinking water. That’s probably just the beginning.
…
Climate change is going to make the extremes more extreme — more intense rain and snowstorms, but also more extended periods of drought. Our big swings will get bigger and more destructive.
But Mathis sees an even worse problem, in particular, that the majority of people aren’t that concerned about climate change.
“Last week, Heatmap News reported its new poll found that Midwesterners are ‘consistently blasé about climate change,’ ” writes Mathis. “Fifty-two percent of folks in our region — a slim majority, but a majority nonetheless — say warming ‘poses little or no risk to their region.’ ”
The residents of those two states are right to be unconcerned about climate change making their states’ respective weather worse since historical evidence and data show that neither drought nor flooding amid recent decades of modest warming are worse than they have been historically.
Indeed, as Mathis himself notes, Kansas and Missouri are not strangers to droughts, floods, and rapidly changing weather extremes.
“The Midwest is already a ‘high variability’ weather region,” writes Mathis, who discussed this fact with Chuck Rice, a professor of soil microbiology at Kansas State University who served on the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2007.
“Think about all the times you’ve heard the joke that if you don’t like the weather around here ‘just wait five minutes.’ ”
Although it is true that parts of Kansas and Missouri are currently suffering from various degrees of drought, it is not a long-term drought, nor is it historically severe.
A short-term drought is not evidence of climate change.
Droughts in the early and mid-twentieth century, 70 and 90 years of global warming ago, were more prolonged and severe than the droughts experienced in either state since the beginning of the 21st century.
Since official record-keeping began, Kansas and Missouri both experienced their most sustained droughts in the 1930s, only to both also experience a sustained drought again in the 1950s.
Longer-term records developed from proxy data show even more severe and sustained droughts, multiple decades-long, have not been uncommon throughout the region’s history.
What’s true of drought across Kansas and Missouri is also true of excessive rainfall and flooding. Kansas experienced its worst flood in 1844; Missouri’s largest recorded flood was in 1785, with the flood year of 1844 being its second-greatest flood.
More costly damage has been done by floods in both Missouri and Kansas since then, in 1903, 1951, 1993, 1998, and 2007.
But the reason that more people and property were harmed by the more recent floods is not higher rainfall totals or deeper flood waters, but rather purely demographics.
More people and development had taken place in the areas flooded than existed in the 19th and early 20th centuries when heavier flooding occurred.
Neither recent rainfall totals nor floodwater depth have been greater in the 21st century than in the past.
Neither a single flood event, no matter how severe, nor a single instance of drought, no matter how widely covered in the media, is evidence climate change is making the weather in Kansas or Missouri worse or less predictable.
Only a long-term sustained trend of either or both types of weather events might implicate climate change in weather changes, but there are no such worsening trends for either state.
In short, data provide no evidence that climate change is making weather worse in Kansas or Missouri, so residents there are displaying common sense when they downplay the threat of climate change in their lives.
The media should follow the public’s lead on this point. Follow the science, Mathis and the Kansas City Star, rather than hyping a false climate alarm narrative.
Read more at Climate Realism
Once again another liberal rag panics the people who read their frontpage fake news just like the notorious NYT,s
Idiots. I was born in St. Louis in 1950 and moved to Arkansas in 1968. The climate is much milder here. I don’t miss the very heavy snowfalls St. Louis received every winter. I well remember the heatwave of 1966 when Union Electric had to institute rotating blackouts all over the St. Louis area. My father moved to St. Louis in 1924 and told me how bad the weather could be back then. Most homes had coal furnaces before natural gas became available. The air pollution was terrible at times due to the coal usage. The subdivision I was raised in was built in 1948 and the builder didn’t think natural gas would be available in time so he built the homes with a brick chimney and a coal chute in the foundation. Fortunately gas did become available so we got a natural gas furnace. But some homes already had a coal furnace installed so they were stuck with it until they could convert. My high school friend who lived up the street from me said that when he was little his parents had to deal with coal heat for several years. Oh, how I loved our gas central heat when I was growing up in the 50’s and 60’s.
These morons need to get a good history book and find out how awful St. Louis weather was often times in the past. I grew up experiencing heat, cold, drought and floods. It’s just weather, not climate change.
Terry, I too was born in St Louis (St Mary’s Hospital) in 1954 and like you I moved to Arkansas (Little Rock) with my family in 1965. My dad’s family lived in Pine Lawn since early 1900s and weather back then was a lot worse than now. Back then most home did not have indoor toilets even in St Louis so they had outhouses. We lived with my grandmother 1962-65 and her basement had a room that was where the coal used to be dumped. Although it was hotter in Little Rock but the winters were much nicer.
I now live outside Denver and enjoy the low humidity and mild (but variable) winters.
I have always joked that I lived such a deprived childhood growing up in the subdivision of Hanley Hills in St. Louis County. The post WWII two bedroom, one bath, full basement homes, had all the modern conveniences such as electrical, indoor plumbing-water & sewer- natural gas and dial telephones.
Every summer we would travel to Arkansas and vacation in the old home my mother was raised in. My grandfather built it on this site in 1901 and my mother was born in 1911.
Back then there were no utilities of any kind. The family used oil lamps, a wood burning cook stove, a well out back for water and a three “holer” outhouse. This house, which today is on the National Register of Historic Places, is an example of how fossil fuels improved the life of Americans.
It was in the early 1930’s that the town first got electric service. Almost every room in this two-story house had a bare bulb suspended on a twisted wire from the ceiling. My grandparents no longer needed oil lamps.
It was in the early forties that natural gas came to town and my grandmother got a natural gas cook stove. But she had to raise her eight children cooking on a wood burning stove for about forty years. They also had to heat this two-story house with wood heat. My grandfather died in 1938 so he didn’t live to see natural gas. My grandmother died in 1948 but she lived her last approximately eight years with the connivence of natural gas cooking and heating. Don’t you know she wished she had gas when she was raising her eight children?
I came along in 1950 and it wasn’t until 1958 that the town got municipal water. I can remember taking baths in a wash tub with well water that my father heated on the gas cook stove. He could never get it hot enough to suit me. I missed our hot water heater and bath tub in our home in St. Louis.
We moved here in 1968 and the town got the sewer system in 1969. My parents had a septic tank installed so we could dispense with the old out house. It was expensive and we only used it one year. My uncle, who lived in the home until his death in 1970, continued to use the outhouse until my parents modernized the house in 1968. I hated that old out house in the summer time. It stank and was always filled with wasp nests.
The town had manual telephone service until 1954. I remember the old magneto crank telephone on the wall. One time my mother visited the home that had the switchboard. The telephone company called it an “agency office.” I remember sitting in the operator’s lap and being fascinated by the switchboard. I guess that explains my 37 year career with Southwestern Bell-AT&T as a technician. In 1954 the new dial building was built across the street from the home that contained the switchboard. I worked in the dial building quite often during my career and I would remember the house across the street, that had the switchboard, which unfortunately burned down in the early 70’s.
In my retirement I have been restoring the old family home. My mother removed the fireplace plus two brick flues in the back of the house. I put it all back in, which includes my grandmother’s original kitchen. I rebuilt the pantry and brick flue that vented my grandmother’s wood burning cook stove.
Several years ago I found the exact model wood burning cook stove for sale in a Tractor Supply Store and took a picture of it. I now have framed it and it’s hanging on the brick flue behind my modern gas stove which sits in the exact spot my grandmother’s wood burning cook stove sat. So the original has now come full circle.
I relate this history because it demonstrates how fossil fuels improved the lives of the people in this small Arkansas town of about 1,300 people. This over 100 year old house stands as a testimony to the quality of life brought about by fossil fuels. I don’t miss those old days one bit.
But I do remember them.
Thanks for your personal story. This is what the idiots of today have no clue about–what life was like not even that long ago, especially in rural locations like Arkansas. Remember what FDR’s administration did in Tennessee (not much from FDR to like though) where the Tennessee Valley Authority really provided electricity throughout much of rural Tennessee with all the hydroelectric dams (same up in Washington state). The ignorant young today are a spoiled bunch who have no idea what “decarbonizing” our societies would do.
Google my name and type Arkansas after it and the first reference should be the feature article that was done on the Dearing House in 2021 by the Arkansas Democrat Gazette. Ignore the reference further down that reports my death. As far as I can tell I’m NOT a ghost.
Interesting story. When I was a young teen I first delivered papers for the Arkansas Democrat (an afternoon paper) then got a route with the Gazette (a morning paper) with my brother. He still lives in the area just southwest of LR in Bryant/Benton. My dad had a Chiropractic office in Beebe. My brother has a cabin a little west of you on the White River a short distance from Heber Springs so I know the area where you live.