Don't fall for the hurricane hype

It was inevitable. You go through 12 years of a hurricane drought, the longest stretch of a category three hurricane hitting the U.S. in American history, and when we get hit the climate hysterics come out of the woodwork. See, they say, global warming caused these storms. Even the pope chided ‘climate deniers’ saying, “When you don’t want to see, you don’t see.”

Well, Francis at least got that right. Let’s see if we can see the facts.

Hurricane Harvey dumped a torrent of rain on Texas but it barely exceeded the downpour from Tropical Storm Amelia in 1978. Back in 1979, Tropical Storm Claudette dumped 42 inches in just 24 hours near Houston, the amount it took Harvey three days to do.

So-called scientists like Michael Mann—who gave us the biggest hoax in global warming history, the debunked hockey stick graph—led with this headline: “It’s a fact: climate change made Hurricane Harvey more deadly.” He claimed Gulf sea surface temperatures have increased by a degree over the past few decades which, he claims, cause 3 to 5 percent more moisture in the atmosphere.

First of all, how does he explain the floods from Amelia and Claudette nearly 40 years ago? There are four major studies on sea surface temperatures according to Anthony Watts at the website WattsUpWithThat.com. Two of them show “weak warming” while the other two show cooling since 1998. This coincides with the land temperature warming “hiatus” that climate hysterics are having a difficult time explaining away.

And then there was the claim that Hurricane Irma was “the strongest hurricane ever recorded in the Atlantic Ocean.” Fox News alert: The Gulf of Mexico is in the Atlantic. This was another attempt to exaggerate a hurricane to score global warming points. In fact, if you judge the strength of hurricanes by maximum sustained winds then Irma was tied for second with three other hurricanes. The others were in 2005, 1998, and 1935. Yeah, I think I see a pattern, don’t you? 

If you judge a hurricane by its minimum atmospheric pressure then Irma was tied for 12th place. Again, the top hurricanes were all over the lot ranging from 2005 to 1988 to 1935. And keep in mind, this is only since we’ve had the capability to accurately measure different aspects of a hurricane which only dates back to 1924. That’s a blip in time.

And obviously hurricanes are not increasing in severity or frequency as Al Gore and his minions keep saying. If we’ve just ended the longest hurricane drought in history then that stat speaks for itself.

Climate hysterics have been predicting each year since 2005 was going to be a horrible year for hurricanes. We listened as they droned on about this each year for twelve years. Eventually they were bound to be right. After all, a stopped watch is right twice a day. This is their year to be right. What that means is they were wrong every other year for the last 12 years. They have no credibility whatsoever.

The irony is that Irma came through and blew the last vestiges of Al Gore’s summer flop out of theaters. The jig is up. The evidence is now overwhelming. CO2 continues to rise yet the temperatures have remained flat for 20 years. There is no correlation between CO2 and temperatures.

Oh, and by the way, there’s a new study out that shows plants are globally getting more efficient because of the rise in carbon dioxide. Hilarious. CO2 is not the boogeyman. It actually feeds the planet. I love it.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning, nationally syndicated talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show.