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Erosive Rainfall Anomalies of Southern Italy
Reference
Diodato, N., Ceccarelli, M. and Bellocchi, G. 2008. Decadal and century-long changes in the reconstruction of erosive rainfall anomalies in a Mediterranean fluvial basin. Earth Surface Processes and Landforms 33: 2078-2093.

What was done
"A detailed analysis," in the words of the authors, "was undertaken of the Calore River Basin (South Italy) erosive rainfall using data from 425-year-long series of both observations (1922-2004) and proxy-based reconstructions (1580-1921)." The more recent of the two series was based on a scheme that employed the Revised Universal Soil Loss Equation, while documentary descriptions provided the basis for the earlier series.

What was learned
Diodato et al. report that the climate history of the Calore River Basin shows pronounced inter-decadal variations, with multi-decadal erosivity reflecting the mixed population of thermo-convective and cyclonic rainstorms with large anomalies," while noting that "the so-called Little Ice Age (16th to mid-19th centuries) was identified as the stormiest period, with mixed rainstorm types and high frequency of floods and erosive rainfall."

What it means
In the concluding section of their paper, the three researchers write that "in recent years, climate change (generally assumed as synonymous with global warming) has become a global concern and is widely reported in the media." One of the chief of these concerns -- which is trumpeted over and over by the world's climate alarmists -- is that extreme weather phenomena, such as droughts and floods, will become both more frequent and more severe as the planet warms. However, Diodato et al. state that their study indicates that "climate in the Calore River Basin has been largely characterized by naturally occurring weather anomalies in past centuries (long before industrial CO2 emissions), not only in recent years," and that there has been a "relevant smoothing" of such events during the modern era.

Reviewed 21 January 2009