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Destructive Windstorms of the Canadian Prairie
Reference
Hage, K.  2003.  On destructive Canadian prairie windstorms and severe winters.  Natural Hazards 29: 207-228.

What was done
The author notes that "media reports in recent years have left the public with the distinct impression that global warming has resulted, and continues to result, in changes in the frequencies and intensities of severe weather events." Hence, to get to the truth of the matter, Hage used "previously unexploited written resources such as daily and weekly newspapers and community histories" to establish a data base adequate for determining long-term trends of all destructive windstorms (primarily thunderstorm-based tornadoes and downbursts) in the prairie provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan in western Canada over the period 1882 to 2001. Moreover, because "sampling of small-scale events such as destructive windstorms in the prairie provinces of Canada depends strongly on the human influences of time and space changes in rural settlement patterns, ? extensive use was made of Statistics Canada data on farm numbers by census years and census areas, and on farm sizes by census years in attempts to correct for sampling errors."

What was learned
The results of the study can be stated quite simply: "all intense storms showed no discernible changes in frequency after 1940," while prior to that time they had exhibited minor maxima.

What it means
Once again, over a period of time described by climate alarmists as having experienced "unprecedented" global warming, and in contradiction of the climate-model-inspired assumption that rising global temperatures increase the frequency and intensity of severe storms, real-world data demonstrate that ? it just ain't so.


Reviewed 6 August 2003