Thursday, September 04, 2008

An inconvenient truth

The meme about "climate change" causing more and/or stronger hurricanes is still mindlessly repeated and suggested by the MSM. Case in point, this article in Time. It sounds like it will cast blame on the current wave of hurricanes in the mid-Atlantic on "climate change." The main point of the article is that the cost of hurricanes is getting worse because more people are living and working in hurricane zones. We can talk later about how federal disaster recovery payments improperly incentivize people to live in hurricane zones.

Of particular note in the article is the following from a real climate scientist, Roger Pielke of the University of Colorado:

"There has been no trend in the number or intensity of storms at landfall since 1900,"says Pielke, a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado. "The storms themselves haven't changed."
Regardless of this uncontradicted testimony confirming that "climate change" has absolutely nothing to do with hurricanes, the Time article still claims:

"Increasingly, climate change is on people's minds, and that is all for the better. Even if climate change has not been the primary driver of disaster losses, it is likely to cause far deadlier disasters in the future if left unchecked."
Really? What other "far deadlier disasters" will happen? Put another way, if "climate change" has not changed the number or intensity of hurricanes, what, praytell, will be these future weather-related "disasters? What other types of environmental disasters are there?

An ice age? That surely is "climate change" but not "global warming" and has nothing to do with "greenhouse gasses." There certainly isn't any scientific consensus (or even bogus concensus) that man's activities are making the planet colder. Or are the enviro-wackos going to start blaming earthquakes and volcanos on "climate change"? Tsunamis? Those are caused by earthquakes or volcanos (or possible meteor strikes).

How about rise in sea levels? Oceans rising by .1 millimeter per year aren't going to kill anyone. Desertification of farmland? Maybe. Where's the evidence this has happened so far, after 40 years of supposed runaway global warming? Floods? Great, we'll get more water to prevent desertification of our farmland.

Put one final way, why does Al Gore's movie have a hurricane on the poster?