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This debate likely may continue ad infinitum between skeptical academics like Happer and his undoubting colleagues doing research with federal grants.

Devastating hurricanes have plagued Texas long before the industrial revolution


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By —— Bio and Archives September 13, 2017

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BALTIMORE — The alta-left pundits of the East Coast media elites — The New York Times, Washington Post, NBC, CNN and their many satellites — wasted no time in rushing to judgment. Torrential rains were still flooding a huge area of southeast Texas when they proclaimed Hurricane Harvey a prime example of devastating climate change. They received standing applause from Al Gore and his legion of federally-funded climate alarmists across the country; but they were jarringly wrong!
Hurricane Harvey is a horrible, extreme case of the weather that typically ravages Texas’ Gulf Coast, but it has nothing to do with global climate change. Some in the burgeoning climate disaster industry claim that Harvey was directly caused by man-made climate change or, at the very least, was made significantly worse by it. This led to frenzied calls for more government action. For example, Sen. Bernie Sanders (Independent-Maine) said, "Is it related to climate change?, the self-declared socialist asked rhetorically. “Is some of the intensity and the magnitude of this related to climate change? I think most scientists believe it is." So, for some perspective considered what happened in the Caribbean long before millions of Americans took to the roads in cars with no emission controls. In 1990, the worst hurricane in American history roared into the port of Galveston destroying thousands of buildings. The governor of Texas estimated 12,000 fatalities. Harvey, thus far, has accounted for less than a hundred. University of Washington professor of meteorology Cliff Mass says climate change was immaterial to the force generated by Hurricane Harvey. “You can’t really pin global warming for something this extreme,” Mass said from his office in Seattle. It has to be natural variability.” Ever since Category 5 Hurricane Katrina in 2004, climate-change advocates have warned that hurricanes and storms would be far worse as a result of global warming. It was inevitable, we were told.
But the fact is, the number of severe, Category 4 hurricanes has declined sharply. Before Harvey, it had been a record 12 years since a major hurricane made landfall in the United States. William Happer a Professor of Physics, Emeritus, at Princeton University and former Director of Energy Research of the US Department of Energy, also is highly skeptical of journalists link global warming to major hurricanes. “Climate has been changing since the Earth was formed some 4.5 billion years ago,” he recently noted. “Climate changes on every time scale — whether decades, centuries or millennia.” “The climate of Greenland was warm enough for farming around the year 1100 A.D., but by 1500 the Little Ice Age drove Norse settlers out,” he noted. “There is no opportunity for a hoax since climate change is so well documented by historical and geophysical records. "But none of the climate change of the past was due to humans. The very minor warming is mostly from non-human causes as well. "What is really being asked is: Do you agree with the party line of the previous administration, that continued emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) will destroy the planet unless the people of the world do exactly what they are told?” This debate likely may continue ad infinitum between skeptical academics like Happer and his undoubting colleagues doing research with federal grants. In the meantime, tens of thousands of Texans are drowning, homeless, hungry and quite possibly shell-shocked.



Whitt Flora -- Bio and Archives | Comments

Whitt Flora, an independent journalist, covered the White House for The Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch and was chief congressional correspondent for Aviation Week & Space Technology magazine.  Readers may write him at 319 Shagbark Rd., Middle River, Md. 21220. 


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