The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is predicting a busy Atlantic hurricane season this year. If it is, or if, God forbid, we suffer a devastating hurricane, expect politicians and media to blame climate change — and therefore you. The blame will be baseless. Weather is not climate.
A terrible storm is traumatic; however, and, to political animals, also exploitable. So be prepared for even more feverish bouts of hysterics calling for wrenching economic changes on the notion it would somehow prevent future catastrophic weather events.
Bad weather has always been with us. So has the idea that weather can be controlled by appeasing a higher power — some god, the gods, or now some nebulous concept of the climate. We’ve returned to a heavily superstitious and unsustainable way of thinking about weather. It’s the 21st century, and we imagine that bad weather means we’ve misbehaved.
The idea of weather misbehavior implies proper behavior. What has been handed down to us is that people need to stop doing anything that emits carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas that we breathe out naturally and that plants, trees, and crops need to grow. We’ve been sermonized at for years that stopping doing anything that results in carbon dioxide emissions, no matter how small, is an act of virtue for which the reward would be — well, not heaven on earth, but maybe not as much future hell.
This “corrective” is what climate grifters are selling at a dear price. Get rid of your cars and buy these plug-in models. Change out your gas-powered stoves, water heaters, indoor heating units, and more for electric ones. Stop eating beef, and start eating bugs. With everything all electric, including your car, double your electricity rates and up your expectation of blackouts, as we replace reliable, working power plants with facilities that work only when the sun and wind allow.
People by and large aren’t interested in such a terrible tradeoff. The grifters know it, so they focus on winning politicians who can force it on us and media who can editorialize about how great it would be.
All that still won’t make weather the climate, however. Even a particularly destructive hurricane cannot be said to be caused by — nor offer proof of — human-caused climate change. President Barack Obama’s undersecretary for science in the US Department of Energy, Dr. Steven E. Koonin, discussed this inconvenient truth in his book, “Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters.”
As Koonin showed all throughout the book, climate science is much, much less certain than politicians and media are about it. Just on the subject of hurricanes, Koonin’s book shows us (emphasis added):
- From the Executive Summary of Chapter 3 of IPCC’s 2012 Special Report on Extreme Events (SREX): “Many weather and climate extremes are the result of natural [i.e., not man-made] climate variability (including phenomena such as El Niño), and natural decadal or multi-decadal variations in the climate provide the backdrop for anthropogenic [human-caused] climate changes. Even if there were no anthropogenic change in climate, a wide variety of natural weather and climate extremes would still occur.”
- From the World Meteorological Society: “… any single event, such as a severe tropical cyclone [hurricane or typhoon], cannot be attributed to human-induced climate change, given the current status of scientific understanding.”
- From the 2014 National Climate Assessment’s Appendix 3: “There has been no significant trend in the global number of tropical cyclones nor has any trend been identified in the number of US land-falling hurricanes.”
- “A landmark paper in 2019 co-authored by eleven tropical cyclone experts” found that “the majority of authors had only low confidence that any other observed tropical cyclone changes were beyond what could be attributed to natural variability.”
- The “data and research literature are starkly at odds with this message” in the media that “[s]torms are becoming more common and more intense, and rising greenhouse gas emissions are going to make it all a lot worse.”
The implications are devastating. Ramrodding rash actions on people — such as shutting down working baseload power plants — using uncertain science is foolish and dangerous.
The only thing North Carolina policymakers can actually accomplish with policies to “fight climate change” is to impoverish North Carolinians — and enrich climate grifters and lobbies. They can make no impact, good or ill, on the climate.
Koonin minced no words in concluding his discussion of hurricanes, hurricane data, and media coverage: “pointing to hurricanes as an example of the ravages of human-caused climate change is at best unconvincing, and at worst plainly dishonest.”
