Fact-checking Fairfax's warmist "scientist-in-residence"

University of NSW lecturer Fiona Johnson is scientist-in-residence at Fairfax newspapers, where her brief seems to be to whip up fear of global warming - even though her doctorate is actually in civil engineering. I'm afraid that lack of expertise is showing today: Johnson claims:

The devastating earthquake followed by typhoon Haiyan that battered the Philippines late last year really hit home for me... [If"> poverty and lack of resources aren't big enough problems to overcome, it is becoming increasingly clear that the poorest communities and nations will face large challenges in trying to deal with the impacts of climate change. The release of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Working Group II report on Monday provides yet another wake-up call that the impacts of climate change are not evenly distributed around the world.

In fact, even the IPCC itself admits there's as yet no observed link between global warming and cyclones:

In summary, confidence in large scale changes in the intensity of extreme extratropical cyclones since 1900 is low... Over periods of a century or more, evidence suggests slight decreases in the frequency of tropical cyclones making landfall in the North Atlantic and the South Pacific, once uncertainties in observing methods have been considered. Little evidence exists of any longer-term trend in other ocean basins… Several studies suggest an increase in intensity, but data sampling issues hamper these assessments…

Next Johnson claims:

For our neighbours in the Pacific, where small communities live on atolls that are only a few metres above sea level, adaptation may not be possible. You can't build infrastructure to protect people if there is no land left. The IPCC points out that rising sea levels mean that life on these atolls will, at some stage, become impossible.