June 25, 2024
Well, with June comes the birthday of West Virginia, the start of summer, and the start of the six-month-long hurricane season.
Hurricanes are one of nature’s most powerful storms, and the strong winds, storm surge flooding, and heavy rainfall can lead to inland flooding, tornadoes, and rip currents, all of which can cause great damage to property and death to those in their path.
Obviously, something like this generates a great deal of attention, particularly in coastal areas where they are most likely to strike.
Stormfax.com tells us that on average there are as many as 12 named storms, 6 hurricanes, and 2 major hurricanes each year during the Atlantic hurricane season.
“As the impacts of climate change have been more and more evident, we have seen and experienced increasing frequency and gravity of extreme weather events,” Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas said recently, when the country’s ability to respond to disasters was being discussed.
The climate change/global warming faction thinks that this year could be a very busy hurricane season as climate change causes storms to be stronger. And, the first named storm of the hurricane season has already arrived, dumping heavy rain on parts of Mexico.
Climate change they say is the result of too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. However, many climate scientists tell us that the Earth is much cooler now than in the past, and that the warming that is cited is not a large increase, and that we are still a long way from the historical warmest temperatures.
Other scientists warn that if we continue to try to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere we will significantly harm plant growth, and it is plants that give us the oxygen that keeps us alive. They also say that rather than cutting the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in half, we need to double it. Doing so, they say, will spur greater plant growth, which is a good thing.
But if the climate change folks are correct that the planet is warming and that it is a true problem, is there correlation between warmer temperatures and more and stronger hurricanes?
David Legates is a professor emeritus of climatology at the University of Delaware, a visiting fellow for the Science Advisory Committee in the Center for Energy, Climate, and Environment at The Heritage Foundation, and has written a book titled “Climate and Energy: The Case for Realism.”
He says that “[If] we have colder periods, we will get more hurricane activity. If we have warmer periods, the hurricane activity tends to drop off.” Under that premise, warmer weather equals fewer and less severe hurricanes.
In an interview for The Daily Signal, interviewer Virginia Allen asked him: “Professor Ligates are hurricanes over the past five to 10 years more severe than hurricanes were maybe 50 or 100 years ago?”
“Of course they are because these sites could never tell you anything that can’t be true,” he responded. “See, when you say more severe, we can parse that in a variety of ways. We can say there’s more hurricanes happening.
“We can say that the hurricanes that happen are becoming more intense. We can say that the hurricanes that are happening are actually becoming larger and more powerful overall. Or we can say that they’re making landfall more often than not. And after all, landfall hurricane is the worst-case scenario. If a big hurricane stays out in the Atlantic, that’s only a good thing unless you’re a shipper.”
He then presented some graphics produced by Ryan Maue, who served as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) chief scientist and produced the graphics from data from NOAA that illustrate his position.
Legates said, “if you look at that record, you see lots of variability over the years, but you see no long-term trend either in tropical storms or hurricanes. So, we can’t really say that over the last 50 years that there’s been a dramatic increase in the number of tropical storms or hurricanes or there has been a drastic decrease. It looks just like there’s lots of variability, which we call year-to-year. Some years we get hit and some years we don’t. And so, there’s no change there.”
After further discussion, Allen asked: “So we’re seeing a decrease in the number that are making landfall?”
“Yes, it is less that are making landfall, which should be a good thing to write home about,” he said. “I know news likes to say, ‘let’s pick on the bad stuff. If it bleeds, it leads,’ but this is good news to write home about [and] that if there’s something in that signal, it’s a good signal.”
In conclusion, Allen asked Legates if there was anything that humans could do to affect the severity of hurricanes. His response: “A warmer world might do that because as we’ve seen [in] the coldest period of the last 400 years, the hurricanes were a little more intense. So maybe a warmer world is the best thing we could hope for.”
Maybe global warming/climate change isn’t really a crisis, after all.
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