Chicago mayor and Clinton crony Rahm Emanuel famously said to never let a crisis go to waste in politics. In the case of Hurricane Matthew, some political operatives and global warming true believers might have wanted the crisis to be worse than it was. It would be consistent with their history.
Hurricane Matthew killed at least 30 Americans and more than 1,000 in total. Damage is estimated to be at least $5 billion.
But apparently that’s not enough death and destruction for the alarmists.
Before Matthew made landfall Saturday in South Carolina, it had been more than 4,000 days since the last hurricane hit the U.S. That’s 10 years, 11 months and about a week.
The alarmists were itching for a large-scale disaster because every day that went by without a hurricane, especially an epic one, meant that their predictions than man-made global warming was going to cause more and bigger storms was another day that made them look like the cons and hopelessly conned that they are.
Their impatient craving for a crisis was summed up well two years ago in August when a fellow named Greg Blanchette tweeted that he “kind of” hoped that North America “gets its ass kicked this hurricane season. It would motivate us on climate action.”
Is this the same Greg Blanchette who proposed that service stations be forced to place frightening global warming warnings on gas-pump nozzles, an idea that’s now law in North Vancouver, British Columbia? Maybe not. But it doesn’t matter. If they’re not the same person, it simply means there are two climate cranks running loose out there with the same name.
A couple of years before Blanchette was wishing for wreck and ruin, British naturalist David Attenborough said that “disaster” was needed to wake people up to the threat of climate change.
The “disasters” the U.S. had experience up to that point “with hurricanes and floods”, he said, “doesn’t do it,” so the crisis he was been hoping for must be truly cataclysmic.
On Friday, as Matthew barreled up Florida’s coast, Marshall Shepherd, a professor in atmospheric sciences at the University of Georgia, tweeted about the “ridiculous complaining” he was seeing about the hurricane being less severe than expected.
“Some seem disappointed there isn’t tragic loss of life/apocalyptic,” he said.
Maybe he was addressing those who were upset because they thought the storm was overhyped by forecasters. Or could he have been addressing those who were thinking like Blanchette and Attenborough? Who, by the way, are not alone.
