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.

Obama going for broke on climate change, uh, climate disruption

Well, let’s see, in the last 40 years we’ve moved from global cooling to global warming to climate change and now climate disruption. That’s the latest ration of rubbish being issued by the White House. Their economic policies are a joke. Obamacare is an unqualified disaster. They’re trying to latch on to something that will connect with voters here before the mid-term elections so they’ve issued yet another Chicken Little report to try and scare people into their arms.

Apparently it’s not working. Most national polls show global warming, uh, climate disruption is a concern for only about 30 percent of Americans. Why so low? Because none of what

these people have predicted has come true. 

I hate to be the one to say I told you so but I told you 2014 was going to be the year they went for broke on this issue. Since they’ve been so wrong for so long they have to up the hysteria to drown out their failure. They figure if they can just work you into a frenzy you won’t actually sit down and look at what’s happening around you.

Well, we did in our movie, An Inconsistent Truth. We learned that the polar bears aren’t dying off, the hurricanes aren’t getting worse, the sea levels aren’t rising, carbon dioxide is not a pollutant. When the earth moved from cooling to warming they changed their tactic from global cooling to global warming. When the earth stopped warming they called it climate change. Now they’re trying to convince you that every time you hear about a tornado or a flood or a drought it’s something entirely new.

There’s really nothing new going on. As we point out in the movie, wild weather isn’t getting any wilder. It’s just that these folks are focusing on it more. Have you ever bought a new car? Right after you start driving that car you start noticing cars just like it all over the place. Before you didn’t notice at all. Do you think there were suddenly more of those cars on the road? Of course, not. You just notice them more.

This is the concept behind drilling “extreme weather” into your head. If you hear that global warming is causing more tornados then every time you hear about a tornado you’ll think it was caused by global warming and, by extension, by humans. Every time you hear about a drought you’re supposed to think global warming. Or, global climate disruption. 

Which brings me to a very interesting point. I heard a report that Miami is experiencing sea level rise. Miami is on the Atlantic Ocean. Now, common sense would tell you that if Miami is really seeing sea level rise then every town on the eastern seaboard would be seeing sea level rise. They’re not. What’s more likely happening is either the coastline is eroding around Miami or the actual land is sinking a bit. This has been shown to be the case in several parts of the world.

By the way, some places on the Atlantic Ocean have seen sea levels recede. If global warming is really global then it would be happening globally. It’s not. But that doesn’t stop people like John Podesta and his boss, Barack Obama, from trying to scare you. And scare you into what? Into joining them in destroying the oil and coal industries that have advanced a civilization farther than most anything else in history.

Maybe if the president is so set on weaning us from fossil fuels he’ll try a stay-cation this summer instead of Hawaii.

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

Doubling down on the global warming hysteria

Is there any wonder that young folks are losing sleep.  Washed up rocker Bob Geldof continues to struggle for relevance with outlandish statements.  "We may not get to 2030," Geldof warned kids at the One Young World summit in Johannesburg, unless something is done about global warming.

Geldof told the young delegates, "There will be a mass extinction event.  That could happen on your watch.  The signs are that it will happen soon."  This is the same hysterical nonsense that has been recklessly thrown out by global warming alarmists for decades.  The bad news for them is "soon" has

come and gone a thousand times and none of what they've predicted has come true.

Let's review.  Al Gore told us in his dreadfully pessimistic motion picture that hurricanes would continue to grow in severity and numbers.  Neither has been true.  In fact, we've been experiencing an abnormally quiet period for hurricanes since Katrina in 2005.  Gore also warned that the polar bears were nearing extinction.  The truth is polar bear populations have exploded since the 1980s.  Gore and his Branch Algorian disciples told us there would be no sea ice in the Arctic by the year 2013.  Arctic sea ice has not only not disappeared, it's 60 percent larger than it was last year.  The doomsday prophets have predicted all sorts of mayhem if we didn't change our evil ways and none of it has come true.

But the torpedo under the water line to the global warming scare has been their very own climate models.  Way back when they were predicting dramatic temperature rise because of our relentless release of CO2 into the atmosphere.  The day of reckoning has arrived.  There are 73 climate models dating back to 1979, the year NASA launched a satellite to track temperature around the globe.  Even though CO2 has continued to rise, temperatures have not.  In fact, despite the IPCC choosing to ignore the obvious, global temperatures have remained steady for the last ten to fifteen years.  In other words, ALL of the climate models were wrong.

The IPCC tells us we can't draw any conclusions from just 15 years of data then, in the same report, tells us humans have been causing global warming only since 1950.  So, 63 years of data plucked from several million years is definitive but 25 percent of that time period is apparently irrelevant if it doesn't fit their political agenda.

You see, Geldof, Gore, et al use guilt as a powerful motivator to separate people from their money.  If you've been convinced you're destroying the planet you'll pay any price to repair the damage.  These hucksters of hysteria know that.

Perhaps Geldof should've picked a time a little further down the road.  The year 2030 is just 17 years away and Bob Geldof is now 62.  Like Al Gore and the IPCC, he may just live long enough to see how ridiculously wrong he was.

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