Another Hurricane Means More Climate Change Hysteria

Hurricane Michael is the first category four storm to make landfall in the panhandle. It’s hurricane season after all, so it’s no big surprise that another storm developed a month after Hurricane Florence battered the Carolinas.

In the intervening weeks, another sort of hurricane captured the media’s attention. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh fought for his dignity and honor under the onslaught of Hurricanes Dianne, Cory, Kamala, and Da Nang Dick.

Fortunately, these hurricanes turned out to be nothing but hot air, pushed out into the Atlantic by Hurricanes Donald, Lindsey, Susan, and Chuck.

Now that the Kavanaugh family is recovering from a category five confirmation battle, the media needs a new shiny object to chase and obsess over.

Fortunately for them, Hurricane Michael is their shiny object for the next several days.

The global warming, now climate change, stories are already in play. In one of Britain’s left-wing papers, The Guardian, they are pushing both Florida politics and climate change hysteria proclaiming, “Opponents claim the Florida governor’s environment policies support portrayals of him as a climate-change denier.”

Governor Rick Scott, now running for the US Senate, is said to be unfit since he doesn’t buy into the climate change talking points of the left.

The United Nations refused to be left out of the climate change handwringing, proclaiming, “Unprecedented changes must be made to stop catastrophic climate change.”

More Chicken Little predictions of falling skies, or in the modern version of the story, rising temperatures.

One of the UN panel leaders threatened, “If action is not taken it will take the planet into an unprecedented climate future.” Where else have we heard such predictions?

America’s preeminent climate oracle Al Gore made an apocalyptic movie in 2006, An Inconvenient Truth.

Early in 2006, when promoting the movie, he predicted that unless we took “drastic measures” to reduce greenhouse gasses, the world would reach a “point of no return” in a mere ten years. He called it a “true planetary emergency.”

Mr. Gore’s ten years have come and gone and the only thing reaching a “point of no return” is the Democrats’ civility and decency, not the climate.

We can’t leave out another great prognosticator, Prince Charles. In July 2009, the Prince of Wales boldly told a group of industrialists and environmentalists, “We have just 96 months left to save the world.”

Ninety-six months equals eight years. And 2009 plus eight years is 2017, a year ago. And the world seems to be doing just fine, except for Democrats who are in a perpetual state of despair.

The global warming alarmists push the hurricane narrative as it’s easier to blame hurricanes on climate change than snowstorms, although they still try to attribute snow to global warming.

Weather Underground asks, “Are category 4 and 5 hurricanes increasing in number?”

The BBC asks a similar question, “Is climate change making hurricanes worse?”

The previously cited Guardian also wonders, “Is climate change making hurricanes worse?”

Are these claims true? Or just more fake climate news and fear mongering? I decided to do my own research. Not as a climate scientist but as a physician with some familiarity with data analysis.

The Stormfax Weather Almanac chronicled “U.S. Mainland Hurricane Strikes By Decade: 1851-2016.” Hurricanes are reported by year and strength based on the Saffir-Simpson wind scale.

Using my marginal Excel skills, I created two plots. The number of hurricanes per decade, from the 1850s to the 2000s, and the average hurricane strength by decade. I omitted the current decade as it is incomplete being only 2018.

Looking first at hurricanes per decade, there is significant variability, from a low of 12 hurricanes in a decade to a high of 25. Looking at the below plot, as if looking at a stock price, the line is gradually trending downward.

What would it look like going back 1500 years instead of only 150 years? Who knows? That data isn’t available. But clearly, the number of hurricanes is not increasing.

Unless the 2010s decade has a sudden bump in hurricanes this year and next, 11 at current count including Michael currently churning in the Gulf of Mexico, the trend line may be heading further downward.

The average strength by decade hovers just above or below an average strength of category 2.

The trend line may increase slightly but the predictions of superstorms haven’t materialized.

The postulated “Category 6” hurricane, which climate warriors believe is headed our way, has never been seen in the world.

But that won’t stop Al Gore and other soothsayers from prophesizing one in the future.

Understand that 150 years of hurricane data is a blink of an eye in the history of the world.

Pick any other such time block out of the millions possible in the planet’s past and there would be a different trend line.

Just as a baseball team can’t be judged on its performance in a single inning of a single game in a 162 game season.

Are hurricanes more costly? Definitely. Low lying swamp land in Florida and along the Gulf Coast is now dotted with hotels, condos, marinas, and cities.

The financial damage from a category 5 storm hitting Miami today versus 1500 years ago is beyond comparison.

Meanwhile, expect the media to trot out the hackneyed stories during this week’s hurricane about global warming and climate change.

Like a broken record, they will blame President Trump, since it makes perfect scientific sense that his pulling out of the Paris Climate Accords last year affects storm formation and development a year later.

Hurricanes are devastating and they are a part of life in the Southeast United States. And will remain so regardless of who sits in the White House or what regulations Congress concocts.

Only the grandiose believe human behavior influences weather which has been part of Planet Earth long before humans existed.

Brett Kavanaugh sits on the high court. The midterms are less than a month away. It’s time for the media to go into serious campaign mode for the Democrats.

Climate alarmism will join #MeToo and the usual hot-button campaign issues as the left attempts to tame Hurricane Donald.

Brian C Joondeph, MD, MPS, a Denver based physician and writer. Follow him on Facebook,  LinkedIn, and Twitter.