Whether they admit it out loud or not, many global warming alarmists want more destructive weather events to validate their assumptions. But what happens when they can’t get their “dirty weather,” as Al Gore calls it? Then they’ll just have define down what a disaster is.
Eleven years ago, Gore swore that “the science is extremely clear now.” Global warming was “magnifying” the “destructive power” of the “average hurricane,” he said. Man’s impact on the environment “makes the duration, as well as the intensity of the hurricane, stronger.”
The weather refused to cooperate with Gore and the U.S. went 11 years without a hurricane making landfall. But Hurricane Matthew renewed the alarmists’ faith in their own nonsense. Acting is if 11 days rather than 11 years had passed, Gore said last week that in Hurricane Matthew, “Mother Nature is giving us a very clear and powerful message.” From the same stage in Florida, Hillary Clinton said “Hurricane Matthew was likely more destructive because of climate change.” The Washington Post, ever dutiful to the man-made global warming narrative, asked climate scientist Michael Mann (whose hockey stick chart supposedly proves human-caused warming but fails the test for some) about her statement. Naturally, he told the Post she was “absolutely” right.
Strain though they might, they’re not convincing anyone who isn’t already riding along on the climate-change disaster wagon. And they know they’re not. So the climate-hysteria movement needs a new approach. It has to in essence redefine what a hurricane is so that what had before been tropical storms and hurricanes that didn’t make landfall will in the future be catastrophic “hurricanes” or “extreme weather” events that they can point to as proof that their fever dreams are indeed reality.
After Matthew dumped more than 17 inches of rain in North Carolina, science editor Andrew Freedman wrote in Mashable that “it’s time to face the fact that the way we measure hurricanes and communicate their likely impacts is seriously flawed. ”
“We need a new hurricane intensity metric,” he said, “that more accurately reflects a storm’s potential to cause death and destruction well inland.”
The current measure is the Saffir-Simpson hurricane scale, which, according to the National Hurricane Center, provides “a 1 to 5 rating based on a hurricane’s sustained wind speed.” But if the intensity of a storm is redefined by using other criteria, such as rainfall and storm surge flooding, the game changes.
“So with a new metric, warmists can declare every storm ‘unprecedented’ and a new ‘record,’ ” says Marc Morano, publisher of Climate Depot and producer of “Climate Hustle,” a movie that “takes a skeptical look at global warming.”
“This is all part of a financial scheme,” says Morano. “If every bad weather event can have new metrics that make them unprecedented and a record, then they will declare it fossil-fuel-‘poisoned weather.’ Warmist attorneys general will use any storm now to get money from energy companies claiming that their company made tornadoes, hurricanes, floods and droughts worse. They will use any bad weather event to shake down energy companies. That is why the extreme storm meme is so important.”
The alarmists need to redefine hurricanes especially now, since the data show that hurricane and tropical storm frequency is “flat to slightly down,” and science — yes, that “settled” field that somehow continues to discover new things — has failed to show a link between hurricanes and global warming. They still need to hide the decline, except this time the decline that must be buried is in hurricanes, not the temperature record.
