Who Do You Trust?

The arrival of the fall hurricane season is always accompanied by claims that these violent storms are unprecedented and are the result of man-made climate change.

So it was over the last week as Hurricane Ida hit the Louisiana Gulf Coast and swept up through the Northeast.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2021/08/30/1032442544/how-climate-change-is-fueling-hurricanes-like-ida

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/02/world/ida-climate-change-floods-rain-intl/index.html

Never mind that if you look at the data regarding hurricane activity over the years it does not support the contention that hurricanes are increasing in number or strength.

For example, it seems that Louisiana is always bearing the brunt of hurricanes each year.

The data actually shows that hurricane activity has slightly declined over the course of the last 170 years according to Dr. Roy Spencer who is a climatologist and former NASA scientist who writes about climate issues.

This chart uses data from the official NOAA National Hurricane Center (NHC) statistics and specifically looks at Louisiana.

Source: https://www.drroyspencer.com/2020/08/even-with-laura-louisiana-hurricanes-have-not-increased-since-1851/

The same is true for hurricanes generally. They are not getting worse. However, the damage they do is worse. Spencer explains.

There will be the inevitable fake news coverage claiming how U.S. landfalling hurricanes are getting worse, a subject which I addressed in my Amazon Kindle e-book Inevitable Disaster: Why Hurricanes Can’t Be Blamed on Global Warming.

Of course, hurricane damage has increased, as people flock to the nation’s coasts and associated infrastructure increases. But we should remember that (for example) Miami only had 444 residents when incorporated in 1896, and now the Miami metroplex has over 6,000,000 inhabitants.

So, yes, storm damage will increase, but not because the weather has gotten worse.

We hear similar warnings from climate alarmist every tornado season.

This is a chart that is often used to attempt to show that tornado activity is increasing by the NOAA.

Notice that even with this chart recent total tornado activity is lower than it was in the 1990's.

Source: https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/tornadoes/202013

I wrote about this last April in a blog post titled "Tornado Watch".

Before you believe that tornado activity is trending up, bear in mind that tornado reporting is much better today than it was 30, 40 or 50 years ago. Nothing occurs on the face of our earth today that is not reported and chronicled. It was not always that way. In years past, many smaller tornadoes were never recorded as they meandered harmlessly across a Kansas field.

The advent of Doppler radar in the early 1990's made it possible to document every tornado no matter how small. The fact is that most tornadoes are category f0 or f1 and they comprise 80% of all tornadoes.

A better perspective in comparing tornado activity over the years is to focus on those storms that are rated f3+ to f5+ on the Fujita scale. These are the tornadoes that cause the most severe damage and would clearly have been captured in previous statistics.  

This data indicates that tornado activity is actually less severe in the United States today than it was previously and has actually been trending downwards in recent years. For example, 2018 had the lowest number of f3+ tornadoes since the NOAA started publishing tornado activity in 1954.

Data from NOAA indicates that F3+ tornadoes have decreased in number in the last thirty years compared to the 1954-1985 period.

Source: Source: https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/inconvenient-weather-fact-for-earth-day-the-frequency-of-violent-tornadoes-fell-to-a-record-low-in-2018/

This is another chart that plots EF3+ tornadoes from 2005-2020.

You can also see here that the number of strong tornadoes have generally been running below the historical average in recent years.

Source: http://www.atmo.arizona.edu/students/courselinks/fall16/atmo336s2/lectures/sec2/tornadoes.html

This summer we have heard innumerable media reports about "unprecedented" wildfires burning vast amounts of acreage in the Western United States.

Acres burned this year is actually BELOW the 5-year average according to the National Interagency Fire Center based on year to date statistics.

Acres burned is actually 40% below what it was in 2015.

Source: https://www.nifc.gov/fire-information/nfn

 

Here is a longer term perspective going back to the 1920's.

Source: https://twitter.com/Tony__Heller/status/1433782601580310534/photo/1

Again, wildfires get much more media attention today because there is a greater chance they will threaten population centers due to massive real estate development that has meant people are living ever closer to the forests and fields that are the tinder for these wildfires.

Keep these facts in mind as you read the headlines and hear the narrative that climate change today is unprecedented and requires immediate actions such as the Green New Deal or other radical ideas.

Even if the claims that carbon emissions must be drastically reduced are accurate consider where massive amounts of these emissions are coming from today.

Below is a chart that shows the 25 mega-cities in the world that produce 52% of the world's urban greenhouse emissions.

23 out of the 25 are in China.

Source: https://twitter.com/dlacalle_IA/status/1432764565129994248

This graph gives you broader context on the global numbers for each continent.

Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/frsc.2021.696381/full?utm_source=fweb&utm_medium=nblog&utm_campaign=ba-sci-frsc-keeping-track-of-greenhouse-gas-emission-reduction-progress-and-targets-in-167-cities-worldwide

While we have politicians unilaterally killing coal, oil and gas in the United States due to "climate change" what are the Chinese doing?

They are going on a coal spree.

Source: https://e360.yale.edu/features/despite-pledges-to-cut-emissions-china-goes-on-a-coal-spree

This shows how many coal generating power plants have been constructed in China over the last 40 years compared to the rest of the world.

Source: https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-will-china-build-hundreds-of-new-coal-plants-in-the-2020s

They are not stopping despite promising they are going to cut carbon emissions.

Why should anyone believe them when they say they are committed to the Paris Accords?

A total of 247 gigawatts of coal power is now in planning or development, nearly six times Germany’s entire coal-fired capacity. China has also proposed additional new coal plants that, if built, would generate 73.5 gigawatts of power, more than five times the 13.9 gigawatts proposed in the rest of the world combined. Last year, Chinese provinces granted construction approval to 47 gigawatts of coal power projects, more than three times the capacity permitted in 2019.

And why do we have politicians who want to decimate our economy that is based on affordable energy when anything that is done will not amount to a hill of beans when you look at global carbon emissions? 

The fact is that if China does not curb carbon emissions the United States could have zero emissions and it would make no difference even if the doomsayers are correct.

Why would anyone trust the Chinese Communist Party on anything?

For example, here is a global map of cumulative deaths from Covid since the pandemic thru September 2.

Which country has had the lowest reported deaths per million from Covid since the pandemic started in Wuhan, China almost two years ago?

Source: https://ourworldindata.org/covid-deaths

I would like to say that China sticks out on this map like a sore thumb but the death rates in most populated countries in the world are colored red. China is about the lightest shade of yellow on it.

China is not actually the lowest. It has had 3.21 deaths per million from Covid. Tanzania has only had .81. 

Peru has had 5,946!

What do I make of all of this?

Don't trust the narrative on climate change.

Don't trust politicians who use the narrative for their own agendas.

Don't trust China. On anything. 

I wrote this eight years ago. It is as true today as it was then.

Only in a liberal mind does it make sense to...

shut down your most cost-effective energy generating source,

shut-off your most abundant energy resource,

raise electricity costs on all Americans,

and risk losing hundreds of thousand of jobs in the process.

In an attempt to solve a problem...

that we are not even sure we have,

and if we do, we are not sure we can do anything about it,

because of natural or external forces that we cannot control, 

that may overwhelm anything we do anyway,

that ultimately works to the advantage of your biggest trade partner,

that will undoubtedly result in more job losses for Americans over the longer term.

When I wrote this, Debbie Wasserman Schultz (Chairman of the Democrat National Committee) and had just stated that her South Florida Congressional District was going to disappear unless climate change was addressed "in a few short years" as rising sea levels would mean she would have to represent the Orlando area.

When I wrote that in July, 2013 the mean sea level at the closest NOAA sea level station nearest Miami (Vaca Key) measured a mean sea level of .0.11 meters. In July, 2021 the mean sea level was 0.099 at the same station. 

The mean sea level in Vaca Key is actually 10% lower than it was eight years ago. 

Is that the few short years she was talking about?

Should you trust your future to anyone who peddles this stuff?