Comedian Trevor Noah asks “how many once-in-a-lifetime events is it gonna take… for everyone to admit that maybe man-made climate change is real”?
Excuse me, Trevor, sneaking “man-made” into the sentence doesn’t make it true. The earth is warming, and man probably plays some part, but the earth was warming before factories and cars were even built.
The Washington Post ran the headline, “Irma and Harvey should kill any doubt that climate change is real.” But that’s absurd.
Of course climate change is real. Climate CHANGES. Always has, always will. For the past 300 years, since what’s called the “little ice age,” the globe has warmed about 3 degrees.
We humans are just not that important. Even if the Paris accord were honored by everyone, (it wouldn’t be) its PROPONENTS admit it would only have slowed warming by maybe… 2 degrees… over a century.
It does us no good to scream “man-made” every time there’s a terrible hurricane.
I wanted to UPDATE this post (the above video and description) a couple ways, with the most recent storm examined in light of history, as well as an older post making similar points.
Hurricane Florence hit as a Category 1… even though we were told this was going to be a Cat 4 or 5 disaster! REAL CLIMATE SCIENCE mentions the “missed by that much” by saying,
“’Hurricane’ Florence is passing over Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina right now, with peak wind speed in the eyewall of 60 MPH and a storm surge of just over three feet.”
Let’s play a game… North Carolina REALLY WAS hit by a category 4 hurricane in 1954:
Hurricane Florence could inflict the hardest hurricane punch North Carolina has seen in more than 60 years, with rain and wind of more than 130 mph (209 kph). North Carolina has been hit by only one other Category 4 storm since reliable record keeping began in the 1850s. That was Hurricane Hazel in 1954.
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Hazel’s winds were clocked at 150 mph (240 kph) at the North Carolina coast and kept roaring inland. They were only slightly diminished by the time the storm reached Raleigh, 150 miles (240 kilometers) inland. Nineteen people died in North Carolina. The storm destroyed an estimated 15,000 buildings.
So what is the deal? We are told hurricanes and tornadoes increasing are a result of climate change. As the earth gets warmer, the weather get’s worse. Right? that is the line… EXCEPT, the weather is getting better? Does that mean then, following the logic of climate alarmists, warming is good?
POWERLINE joined the historical fun yesterday with the following:
As has already been noted here in the latest Green Weenie Award, the climatistas are all spun up to say that Hurricane Florence proves that catastrophic climate change is upon us and that we need to hand over our car keys to Al Gore right now. If you pay attention to extreme weather trends, you’ll know that the period between Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and last year saw no hurricanes making landfall on the continental U.S. (Sandy was a tropical storm by the time it made landfall in 2012), but that hiatus didn’t mean anything. Weather only means something when it fits the narrative.
Check out this chart, from Roger Pielke Jr, of long term hurricane landfalls on the eastern seaboard (“MH” means “major hurricanes”):
Tucker Carlson has DR. SPENCER on to discuss the politics involved in hurricanes (the experiment by Bill Nye “the science guy” being shown false can be found here at WATTS UP WITH THAT):
…weather, especially tornadoes and hurricanes have lessened over the years. In other words, if Michael Grunwald (the author of the Time article) says weird weather is a indicator, an evidence for, that warming weather is something we should be fearful of and act on, what is normalizing weather and no warming suppose to indicate… OTHER THAN the whole premise of the article in a major magazine is undermined.
The 2013 hurricane season just ended as one of the five quietest years since 1960. But don’t expect anyone who pointed to last year’s hurricanes as “proof” of the need to act against global warming to apologize; the warmists don’t work that way.
Warmist claims of a severe increase in hurricane activity go back to 2005 and Hurricane Katrina. The cover of Al Gore’s 2009 book, “Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis,” even features a satellite image of the globe with four major hurricanes superimposed.
Yet the evidence to the contrary was there all along. Back in 2005 I and others reviewed the entire hurricane record, which goes back over a century, and found no increase of any kind. Yes, we sometimes get bad storms — but no more frequently now than in the past. The advocates simply ignored that evidence — then repeated their false claims after Hurricane Sandy last year.
And the media play along. For example, it somehow wasn’t front-page news that committed believers in man-made global warming recently admitted there’s been no surface global warming for well over a decade and maybe none for decades more. Nor did we see warmists conceding that their explanation is essentially a confession that the previous warming may not have been man-made at all.
That admission came in a new paper by prominent warmists in the peer-reviewed journal Climate Dynamics. They not only conceded that average global surface temperatures stopped warming a full 15 years ago, but that this “pause” could extend into the 2030s.
But keep in mind, our total Co2 (carbon) emissions is no laughing matter:
Even the IPCC and British Meteorological Office now recognize that average global temperatures haven’t budged in almost 17 years. Little evidence suggests that sea level rise, storms, droughts, polar ice and temperatures or other weather and climate events and trends display any statistically significant difference from what Earth and mankind have experienced over the last 100-plus years…
Besides the Global Warming crowd blaming everything on it (even the violence in the “arab spring“!), its failed predictions about no ice in the north-pole, no more snow in europe, islands drowning, polar bear numbers, and the like… Al Gore’s claims about Hurricanes is [again], laughable, to wit: when you even lose Jeraldo Rivera, your leftist stance may be very laughable:
Al Gore was recently taken to task for exaggerating claims involving the frequency and intensity of hurricanes. The latest weather news makes his misrepresentations look all the more ridiculous.
For the first time since 2002, this year there will be no hurricane activity before September 1.
Reports indicate this is only the 25th time in 161 years that has happened.
The first hurricane of the season has formed on or after September 1 only 25 times in the past 161 years. Since the satellite era began in the mid-1960s, there have only been five years without a hurricane by August 31. The last time a hurricane failed to form before September 1 was in 2002 when Hurricane Gustav formed on September 11.
It would be foolish to make fun of anything involving such potentially dangerous storms and it’s also possible we could still see many late developing storms. However, given all the misleading information passed off on the topic by Gore, his allies and a fawning media, hopefully any lack of serious storm activity won’t be buried by the media for political reasons.
NOAA’s Storm Prediction Center keeps a daily count of cumulative number of tornadoes in the U.S. each year, and recent years have had an unusually low number of tornadoes.
As of October 3, the cumulative total for 2018 is 759; the previous lowest number of tornadoes for this date was 761. The SPC has records extending back 65 years.
Eight tornadoes hit the United States last month, tying the record for the fewest tornadoes in March, according to preliminary data from the Storm Prediction Center.
The last time there were so few tornadoes in March was in 1969, said Greg Carbin, a meteorologist with the prediction center in Norman, Okla. Accurate tornado records began in 1950.
A typical March sees about 80 twisters in the United States, the National Climatic Data Center said.
The only notable outbreak of tornadoes this March was last week, when several twisters formed in Oklahoma and Arkansas, killing one person in Tulsa. That’s the only tornado death this year.
Overall, it’s been a rather quiet year so far for tornadoes, with just 30 hitting the United States. Again, 1969 is the only year that was calmer, when 16 twisters were reported in January, February and March, Carbin said…..
….Figure 1 [top] shows all tornadoes above EF1. (See here, why EF1’s are excluded.) The 10-Year Trend is significantly below the level consistently seen up to 1991, although the high totals in 2011 have inevitably caused a small upwards blip.
We see a similar pattern with the stronger EF3+ tornadoes.
I do not claim to know what will happen to tornado numbers in coming years. And anyone who does is lying.
Does “global warming” cause tornadoes? No. Thunderstorms do. The harder question may be, “Will climate change influence tornado occurrence?” The best answer is: We don’t know….
Today marks 4,001 days since the last major hurricane (Wilma in 2005) made landfall in the United States. A major hurricane (Category 3 to 5) has maximum sustained winds of at least 111 mph, and “landfall” means the center of the hurricane eye crosses the coastline.
This morning it looks like Matthew will probably not make landfall along the northeast coast of Florida. Even if it does, its intensity is forecast to fall below Cat 3 strength this evening. The National Hurricane Center reported at 7 a.m. EDT that Cape Canaveral in the western eyewall of Matthew experienced a wind gust of 107 mph.
(And pleeeze stop pestering me about The Storm Formerly Known as Hurricane Sandy, it was Category 1 at landfall. Ike was Cat 2.)
While coastal residents grow weary of “false alarms” when it comes to hurricane warnings, the National Weather Service has little choice when it comes to warning of severe weather events like tornadoes and hurricanes. Because of forecast uncertainty, the other option (under-warning) would inevitably lead to a catastrophic event that was not warned.
This would be unacceptable to the public. Most of us who live in “tornado alley” have experienced dozens if not hundreds of tornado warnings without ever seeing an actual tornado. I would wager that hurricane conditions are, on average, experienced a small fraction of the time that hurricane warnings are issued for any given location….
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Seldom does an actual anemometer (wind measuring device) on a tower measure anything close to what is reported as the maximum sustained winds. This is because there aren’t many anemometers with good exposure and the chances of the small patch of highest winds hitting an instrumented tower are pretty small. It also raises the legitimate question of whether maximum sustained winds should be focused on so much when hurricane intensity is reported. Media hype also exaggerates the problem. Even if the maximum sustained wind estimate was totally accurate, the area affected by it is typically quite small, yet most of the warned population is under the impression they, personally, are going to experience such extreme conditions….
WATTS UP WITH THAT also includes the report from the National Hurricane Center:
Still no landfall for #Matthew, remains Cat 3 storm
So far, Florida has been lucky. While the storm remains dangerous, it seems it has continued just off the coast, and has begun the first steps towards a northeast turn. NHC’s 9AM EST reports had this to say:
…EYEWALL OF DANGEROUS HURRICANE MATTHEW HUGGING THE COAST OF CENTRAL FLORIDA…
SUMMARY OF 800 AM EDT…1200 UTC…INFORMATION ———————————————- LOCATION…28.9N 80.3W ABOUT 35 MI…55 KM NNE OF CAPE CANAVERAL FLORIDA ABOUT 45 MI…75 KM ESE OF DAYTONA BEACH FLORIDA MAXIMUM SUSTAINED WINDS…120 MPH…195 KM/H PRESENT MOVEMENT…NNW OR 330 DEGREES AT 13 MPH…20 KM/H MINIMUM CENTRAL PRESSURE…944 MB…27.86 INCHES
DISCUSSION AND 48-HOUR OUTLOOK —————————— At 800 AM EDT (1200 UTC), the eye of Hurricane Matthew was located near latitude 28.9 North, longitude 80.3 West. Matthew is moving toward the north-northwest near 13 mph (20 km/h), and this general motion is expected to continue today. A turn toward the north is expected tonight or Saturday. On the forecast track, the center of Matthew will be moving near or over the east coast of the Florida peninsula through tonight, and near or over the coasts of Georgia and South Carolina on Saturday. Maximum sustained winds are near 120 mph (195 km/h) with higher gusts. Matthew is a category 3 hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale. Although weakening is forecast during the next 48 hours, Matthew is expected to be a category 3 hurricane as it moves near the coast of Florida today. Hurricane-force winds extend outward up to 60 miles (95 km) from the center, and tropical-storm-force winds extend outward up to 185 miles (295 km). Cape Canaveral recently reported and wind gust to 97 mph (155 km/h), and Daytona Beach reported a wind gust of 67 mph (110 km/h)……………