Climate alarmist were in glory when Hurricane Ian hit Florida. A Category 4 hurricane, it suddenly switched course, hitting an area of Florida that the National Weather Service had predicted it would not hit and which had therefore not been as prepared as the Tampa area it was expected to hit. Joy Behar, convinced that global warming, or “Climate Change” as it is now dubbed, is responsible for more and stronger storms, mocked Governor DeSantis for not holding her views. “And now, his state is getting hit with one of the worst hurricanes that we will ever see!” she exclaimed, in exulted horror!
And yet, poor Joy knows not of what she speaks! This hurricane season had, until this storm, been quiet, with no hurricanes at all in August and neither of the hurricanes in the Atlantic during September hitting the U.S. either. Ian was our first major hurricane this season, a season that usually extends from August through October. But let’s look at some major storms of the past that Behar is perhaps unaware of.
David Harsanyl, journalist and Harvard graduate compiled hurricane information for our (and Behar’s) information. Since Behar’s birth in 1942, Florida has seen 48 hurricanes make landfall. Eleven of them were Category 3, nine of them (including Ian) Category 4, and only three of them Category 5. Category 5 storms, Behar apparently does not know are worse than Ian’s Category 4. Some of the hurricanes of the past were horrific, compared to Ian. In the 1900’s, eight years before cars began emitting carbon and destroying the earth, the Great Galveston hurricane hit Texas, killing around 10,000 people! In 1926, the Great Miami hurricane killed 372 and caused an estimated inflation-adjusted $164 billion in damage. Luckily, only about 150,000 people lived in Dade County or the number of deaths would have been higher. The Great Labor Day Hurricane of 1935 and the 2019 Hurricane Dorian tied for the strongest maximus sustained landfall winds at 185 mph. So how then, are hurricanes getting worse?
The problem, of course, is that while no one can prove that Climate Change causes more and worse hurricanes, neither can one prove absolutely, except through looking at historical data, that Climate Change does not cause more and worse hurricanes, or floods, or snowstorms, or droughts. And although the Climate Change crew’s computer models have been wrong time after time, Climate Change and “green energy” has become such big business that politicians and corporations and even farmers find it advantageous to buy into the myth and reap the dollars that result.
The horrid hurricane story began with Katrina in 2005, a Category 3 hurricane, that hit an unprepared New Orleans and an equally unprepared FEMA. Al Gore jumped in with his book, An Inconvenient Truth, which made him millions but failed to cause the polar bears to become extinct or coastal cities to become submerged from melting ice caps that failed to melt as he had warned. That hurricane season finished out with two more Category 3 hurricanes, neither of which was as devastating. Yet, despite his Gore’s predictions of many, even worse hurricanes, U.S. shores have not been hit by more frequent and more powerful hurricanes. According to National Geographic, during an average hurricane season, ten tropical storms form and two or three of them become hurricanes. These vary in severity and may or may not make landfall in the continental U.S. Of the costliest storms because of the damage they were able to cause, only two have occurred since Gore’s dire predictions after Katrina in 2005. They were Ian, this year and Michael in 2018. The other horrific storms happened in 1884, 1919, 1928, 1935, 1960, 1961, 1965, and 1992. Even in these costly storms the years 2019, 2020, and 2021 did not see hurricanes of this severity and Ian has been the only one to hit this year, late in the season.
More important than property damage is cost in human lives. But no hurricane since Katrina in 2005 including Ian has reached the list of ten deadliest. In Katrina, approximately 1,500 people lost their lives. In 1893 as many as 2,000 may have died in South Carolina and Georgia while in Florida’s 1928 hurricane, the number of deaths may have reached nearly 3,000. In Ian, a Category 4 storm, across three states, the loss of life appears to be about 122 individuals.
So, Joy Behar’s “one of the worst hurricanes that we will ever see!” was truly bad for those who now have to deal with the ravages of the storm, but “one of the worst hurricanes that we will ever see” it certainly was not. Just as, in the midst of what we are told is a warming earth, we in the Midwest enjoyed a relatively mild summer with none of the upper 90s and 100 degree temperatures we have had in summers past when the earth was apparently cooler, the predictions of the climate alarmists never quite come to pass. But still people believe them. And it is hard not to.
Climate change and green energy is big business with government grants and subsidies that companies and universities are eager to get, even if it means stretching the truth a bit. And the average person can find little information that is contrary to the approved Climate Change Religion on the Internet (today’s chief means of research) because Big Tech has also succumbed to the Green Religion. The World Economic Forum held an anti-disinformation panel last week which the United Nation’s Undersecretary for Communications Melissa Fleming attended (along with representatives from CNN and Brown University in the States). According to the Post Millenial, she announced that the United Nations is working together with Big Tech companies to control misinformation on climate change. “We partnered with Google, for example, if you Google ‘climate change,’ you will, at the top your search, you will get all kinds of UN resources,” she explained. “. . . We own the science, and we think that the world should know it, and the platforms themselves, also do.”
Can science be owned? If you make it up, I guess it can be! So, don’t Google “Are hurricanes getting worse?” because you will probably find a myriad of articles telling you that they are, even though there are fewer hitting our coast and the loss of life is less. But, hey. Who am I to argue with the Undersecretary for Communications of the United Nations, huh?