It used to be that at least in the winter months we could look forward to a break from non-stop climate propaganda. Climate alarmists used to be strictly warm-weather creatures. After all, they look a bit silly, chanting “It’s getting hot in here!” when an unseasonal blizzard has driven everyone else inside.
Not anymore, alas. Far from being deterred by the continual failure of their doom-saying predictions, the Climate Cult have doubled down. When there are summer bushfires, it’s climate change. When there are winter rains, it’s climate change.
And when, as they do every year, hurricanes roll in off the Gulf of Mexico — you better believe that’s climate change.
As the category three storm rolled over Cuba on its way to the coast of Florida, major publications were already flush with stories about how Hurricane Ian was worse because of human-induced climate change. Ian had “intensified into a monster with climate markings”, said the Scientific American; for Time, climate change was “rapidly turbocharging storms like Ian”; and Salon.com said climate change was “helping” the hurricane.
It doesn’t matter one whit that absolutely none of that is true. In fact, far from increasing in number or intensity, hurricanes in the US have notably decreased.
Steve Koonin, a former undersecretary for science in the US Department of Energy during the Obama administration, points out in his 2021 book Unsettled that “hurricanes and tornadoes show no changes attributable to human influences”.
“Pointing to hurricanes as an example of the ravages of human-induced climate change is at best unconvincing, and at worst plainly dishonest,” he concludes, after reviewing a range of government statistics and academic papers.
The same is true, by the way, for the most powerful tornadoes, which have declined in number by 40 per cent in the US in the 60 years since the 1950s, he finds.
But “unconvincing” and “dishonest” are practically the mission statements of the Climate Cult. It was only a couple of months ago that the ABC was shrieking its head off about floods in NSW and plying carefully fudged graphs — when the full data clearly showed a long-term decline in floods over the last 200 years.
Environmentalist Michael Shellenberger, in congressional testimony earlier this month, said the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration had pencilled in a substantial decrease – 25 per cent – in the overall number of Atlantic hurricanes and tropical storms going forward.
Why? Why else does anything ever happen, according to the Climate Cult? Human-induced global warming, of course.
The number of tropical cyclones each year was 13 per cent lower in the 20th century “and the main cause was global warming” caused by humans, according to a study published in Nature in June. “While changes in sea surface temperature are expected to intensify storms, some associated changes in atmospheric circulations in the tropics are thought to prevent storm formation,” one of the authors said.
Is it worse for the planet to have significantly fewer, if a bit more intense, storms? Perhaps more climate change is good?
Now, don’t start asking questions like that.
Otherwise, you might start asking yourself if the observed considerable increase in global plant cover, attributed to higher atmospheric CO2 concentrations, is more a good thing than bad. You might be tempted to wonder if the global substantial decrease in cold-related deaths — far outweighing the slight rise in heat-related deaths, is, on balance, a positive.
The death toll each decade from natural disasters has plummeted since a peak of the 1920s by 92 per cent, according to Shellenberger’s analysis of the International Disaster Database.
“In that decade, 5.4 million people died from natural disasters; in the 2010s, 400,000 did,” he wrote in Forbes earlier this year.
The Australian
Remind me again, of why we’re supposed to be so terrified of a slight fluctuation in global temperatures. One that’s well within the range of natural variation?
Remind me why, as scientist Ian Plimer says, we’re the first humans in history to be afraid of a warm climate.
