Or, Why Scaremongers Shouldn’t Predict the Weather.
Image from Al Gore film “An Inconvenient Truth” attempting to make the connection between global warming and increasing hurricanes.
The 2006 Hurricane season ends officially on Thursday, November 30. It will go down as one of the quietest hurricane seasons on record. Good news for coastal residents like myself who faced anxiety or in some cases extreme loss in the previous season. Compare the maps of storm tracks from this year with last year. Quite a remarkable difference.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Readers may recall that at the beginning of the hurricane season alarmists took to the airwaves to insist that this year could be as bad as the previous year, or worse. Take a look back at the hurricane forecast from “Accuweather:”
One in Six Americans Could be Directly Impacted by 2006 Hurricane Season AccuWeather.com Hurricane Center Forecasts Potential Ripple Effect for All Americans
May 15, 2006-The AccuWeather.com Hurricane Center, led by Chief Forecaster Joe Bastardi, today released its 2006 hurricane season forecast. An active hurricane season appears imminent, which could have major repercussions for the U.S. economy and the one in six Americans who live on the Eastern Seaboard or along the western Gulf of Mexico.
For the 2006 Hurricane Season-which traditionally runs from June 1 through November 30-Bastardi and his team are forecasting that six tropical cyclones will make landfall in the U.S. Five of these landfalling storms are likely to be hurricanes, with three being major hurricanes of Category 3 or greater. …
“There are few areas of the U.S. East Coast and Gulf of Mexico that will not be in the bull’s eye at some point this season,” said Ken Reeves, AccuWeather’s Director of Forecast Operations. Ironically, though, the region that was hammered the hardest last year-the central and eastern Gulf Coast-has one of the lower probabilities of receiving another major hurricane strike in 2006.” …
How the 2006 Hurricane Season Will Compare to the 2005 Season Following on the heels of 2005’s record-shattering hurricane season, 2006 will feature fewer storms, but will still be a season of above-average storm frequency.
Well, they sure blew that one didn’t they?
But the weather forecasters were not alone. The shrieking high priests of environmental scaremongering used the unusually bad hurricane season of 2005 to launch another salvo in their bid to impose socialist economic principles on the United States masquerading as environmental science.
They lined up to insist that manmade global warming was the cause of the unusually bad hurricane season of 2005 and that we are all doomed unless we agree to their radical prescription for change. This same flawed reasoning was parroted by Democrats who have always had a weak understanding of science. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. went so far as to blame President Bush for the severity of Hurricane Katrina.
Let’s not forget the protestors who demanded the resignation of Max Mayfield, Director of the National Hurricane Center because he and other serious climate scientists refused to endorse the scaremongering of “environmental” (socialist) activists.
Strong arm tactics haven’t stopped with Hurricane Center scientists. Richard Linzen, the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Science at MIT writes of a chilling campaign against scientists who fail to worship at the global warming altar:
Climate of Fear
Global-warming alarmists intimidate dissenting scientists into silence.
BY RICHARD LINDZEN
Opinion Journal
Wednesday, April 12, 2006…Scientists who dissent from the alarmism have seen their grant funds disappear, their work derided, and themselves libeled as industry stooges, scientific hacks or worse. Consequently, lies about climate change gain credence even when they fly in the face of the science that supposedly is their basis. …
In 1992,[Al Gore] ran two congressional hearings during which he tried to bully dissenting scientists, including myself, into changing our views and supporting his climate alarmism. Nor did the scientific community complain when Mr. Gore, as vice president, tried to enlist Ted Koppel in a witch hunt to discredit anti-alarmist scientists–a request that Mr. Koppel deemed publicly inappropriate. And they were mum when subsequent articles and books by Ross Gelbspan libelously labeled scientists who differed with Mr. Gore as stooges of the fossil-fuel industry.
Sadly, this is only the tip of a non-melting iceberg. In Europe, Henk Tennekes was dismissed as research director of the Royal Dutch Meteorological Society after questioning the scientific underpinnings of global warming. Aksel Winn-Nielsen, former director of the U.N.’s World Meteorological Organization, was tarred by Bert Bolin, first head of the IPCC, as a tool of the coal industry for questioning climate alarmism. Respected Italian professors Alfonso Sutera and Antonio Speranza disappeared from the debate in 1991, apparently losing climate-research funding for raising questions.
And then there are the peculiar standards in place in scientific journals for articles submitted by those who raise questions about accepted climate wisdom. At Science and Nature, such papers are commonly refused without review as being without interest. …
Indeed, there is a strange reluctance to actually find out how climate really behaves. In 2003, when the draft of the U.S. National Climate Plan urged a high priority for improving our knowledge of climate sensitivity, the National Research Council instead urged support to look at the impacts of the warming–not whether it would actually happen.
Alarm rather than genuine scientific curiosity, it appears, is essential to maintaining funding. And only the most senior scientists today can stand up against this alarmist gale, and defy the iron triangle of climate scientists, advocates and policymakers.
The real alarming trend here is the active campaign to politicize science and punish scientists who commit the heresy of pursuing scientific research which questions the validity of global warming baloney.
One wonders if the scaremongers who blamed President Bush for the increase in violent hurricanes will now apologize? Don’t hold your breath.
Also posted at Mike’s America
Said Mike's America @ 10:57 am | Permalink
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I too live on the coast and work in Emergency Management so we were gearing up for the “big season”, we were lucky this year. I read a book a few years ago called “The Highlanders”, about Scotland and its history. A part of the book discussed the warm weather that saturated the region for almost a century causing widespread chaos in the production of food, and all this happened before Bush became President (weeping and nashing of teeth from some readers). The facts stand that the earth goes through phases, and something as simple as a volcano can produce more green house gases than man can……and the earth survives……now this MAY have killed the dinosaurs, but that is another story, they did not have satelite TV.
Comment by Richard Nixon — 11/29/2006 @ 11:26 am
Richard: We’re all relieved that the hurricane hysterics were proved wrong this year.
It started off pretty bad with the “breaking news” every 15 minutes speculating on that first storm, but things quieted down after that.
It’s no use trying to inform global warming hysterics that the earth has gone through heating and cooling cycles before which are totally independent of man’s activity. They simply refuse to listen.
The not so secret dirty secret is that ideology, not science, is driving the craze.
Comment by Mike's America — 11/30/2006 @ 1:21 am
Environmentalists are well aware that the Earth goes through cooling and heating cycles. Even in the middle of an ice age there will be years where you can soak up the sun. That does not change the overall outlook, however. One year is not a basis for refuting the statistics for thousands of years.
Every scientist that has studied and written scientific articles on this issue (over 1000 of them, to date) agrees that global warming is happening and that humans are primarily responsible for the change. To pretend that this is some left-wing conspiracy is about as useful as (the tired cliché) re-arranging deck chairs on the titanic.
We need to stop arguing about what all scientists have already concluded, and start working on a solution.
Think of it this way: What is the harm on fixing the problem if it is a left-wing conspiracy? What harm will be done if we do nothing and it turns out the greenies are correct? I do not want to be on the wrong side of those questions.
Comment by Monty — 11/30/2006 @ 9:44 am
Monty, I would agree that we should look at alternative fuel choices, but the “left wing” as you so quaintly called them always pushes their agenda in such radical ways (purely my opinion) by demanding that we (the USA) make drastic changes that would affect the entire national economy, if not the economy of the world. We cannot do that, we need to change slowly, not overnight. We did not go from the wagon to the space shuttle in a single bound, we had to deal with the model T and the Wright brothers first. I agree that polution is bad for the earth, I wish everyone would recycle, I wish fuel was cleaner, but the cleanest power available is also under attack (nuclear). Honestly it almost seems as if to make a few squeeky wheels happy we have to live in the woods, eat turnips, and supply abortions on demand, but who wants to live like that…….no TV? (said with as much humor
as one can dislay on a screen… 
angry people need not reply 
)
Comment by Richard Nixon — 12/1/2006 @ 8:35 am
Monty:
Get serious!
When you say “Every scientist that has studied and written scientific articles on this issue (over 1000 of them, to date) agrees that global warming is happening and that humans are primarily responsible for the change” You’re making an absolute statement that is simply not supported by the facts. I have given you one example of a scientist in this post who sees it differently and he is not alone.
Global warming has been happening on and off since the planet was formed. However, there is NO absolute conclusion by “Every scientist that has studied and written scientific articles on this issue” that man is responsible for the most recent changes.
Thank you for confirming the point of my post which is that some people prefer ideology over science.
Comment by Mike's America — 12/1/2006 @ 10:54 am
I’d just like to add that if this particular “science expert,” had actually watched An Inconvenient Truth, or read any of the scientific articles on global climate change and its effect on hurricanes, he would find out that they only assert that global warming increases the intensity of such storms (e.g. Katrina when it passed over the unusually warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico). The reason a hurrican forms is more complex than simply temperature, and no reputable scientist could claim otherwise. The number of hurricanes in a given year is in no way related to global warming. Thus, this year’s lack of storms neither proves, nor disproves global warming.
Comment by Jack Black — 12/5/2006 @ 10:05 am
“Thus, this year’s lack of storms neither proves, nor disproves global warming.”
Exactly right Jack.
Just as the unusually high number of storms in 2005 proved nothing.
But do the global warming zealots realize that? Nope!
Comment by Mike's America — 12/6/2006 @ 1:17 pm