Roger Pielke Jr's weather disaster essay is too simplistic, and befuddles deniers at WUWT

It's a short article. Short in length and short on substance. I'm referring to a paper written by Roger Pielke Jr. where he attempts to report on whether and how much progress there has been in a small part of one of the seventeen United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDG).

The paper attracted the attention of Anthony Watts, a science denier who runs a blog known as WUWT. Anthony, not being the brightest spark, not even in the dark deniosphere where the bar for brightness is low, got the paper upside down and inside out. More on that later.

Sustainable Development Goals

The UN's SDG has 17 goals aimed at improving societies, the well-being of people, and the sustainability of the planet. Each goal has several parts and, at present, 232 unique indicators. The indicators are for measuring progress toward achieving the goals.

WUWT strawman: Week 13 of 52 - not much extreme weather? So sez Anthony Watts

Anthony Watts, or one of his surrogates, has made a brief appearance at WUWT to write a headline and an opening salvo. Here is what he wrote (archived here):

So far, 2015 seems to be a bad year for the ‘severe weather caused by climate change” meme

Anthony Watts / 21 mins ago March 22, 2015

Looks like another “divergence problem” as tornadoes don’t follow the climatology

That's it. The rest was a copy and paste of an article from NOAA (archived here). The NOAA article was about how there have been no tornadoes reported in the USA this March, so far. This is a record - since 1970 at any rate.

Anthony Watts talked about a "meme", but what he wrote is a logical fallacy known as a strawman, as you'll see below.

The Red Cross World Disasters Report that you won't find at WUWT

The Red Cross has released this year's edition of its annual publication, The World Disasters Report 2014. This year the focus is on culture and risk.

Table 10 of the report shows that in the past ten years, almost two million people have been affected by all disasters (technological and natural), with more than 95% of these people being affected by "climato-, hydro- and meteorological disasters". Of the people reported killed in disasters in the past decade (Table 6):

• 329,000 (31%) died as a result of climato-, hydro- and meteorological disasters
• 651,000 (61%) died as a result of earthquakes and tsunamis
• 80,000 (8%) died as a result of technological disasters (eg industrial and transport accidents).