RUTHFULLY YOURS

We’re about half way through the 2023 hurricane season, predicted by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration forecasters to be a near-normal year, and it’s been rather quiet. But with a few storms brewing this week in the Atlantic, we expect to hear the usual shrieking from politicians, activists and the media, blaming the weather on man-caused climate change. Our suggestion is to pay no attention to the eco-screamers’ lamentations.

On Sunday, the National Hurricane Center issued advisories for a hurricane and a tropical storm in the Atlantic Ocean, and an advisory for a tropical storm in the Eastern Pacific. Of the three, the Atlantic storm Idalia seems to be the most dangerous. It could make landfall as a hurricane on the Gulf coast of Florida on Wednesday.

That could mean a life-changing disaster for thousands of Floridians. The climatistas, though, see opportunity in crisis. They never let a serious calamity go to waste. Before the weekend was over, the press was linking Idalia to “climate change,” which is of course code for “man-made global warming,” as if there had never been a hurricane before humans began burning fossil fuels.

The alarmist community has long insisted that weather is not the same as climate any time anyone ever pointed to mild summers and colder-than-usual winters as evidence that the global warming theory was bunk. But when it’s convenient for spreading fear, the same crowd takes isolated weather events and claims they are evidence that human activity is warming the planet.

Even in 2023, truth is still important to some of us, and the facts show that the global warming zealots are false prophets. Inconvenient to their con are data that show that death and destruction from climate-related disasters have fallen sharply over the last century. Annual fatalities from floods, droughts, wildfires, storms, and extreme temperatures have tumbled by nearly 98% over that era, from nearly 500,000 in the early 1920s to fewer than 12,000 in 2022. The details don’t fit the narrative, but when did that ever matter to the political left that continues to feed the fiction that man is setting his planet on fire?

Going back more than a 100 years, we can see from the data that today’s hurricane activity, defined as a hurricane making landfall in the continental U.S., is roughly the same as it was at the turn of the previous century. As author Michael Shellenberger says, the media have “lied about hurricanes,” “lied about heat waves,” “lied about floods,” and of course “all they do is lie about fires.”

The climate mob has also lied about snowfall, polar ice, polar bears, the temperature record, and the reliability of their warming models.

In fact, members of the climate cult lie, exaggerate, embellish, and misinform nearly every time they move their lips. It’s their nature. They’ve been coached to overstate the global warming argument so that the public will be frightened enough to buy into the apocalyptic version of events. In the minds of the climate clerisy, “information manipulation has an instrumental value,” which means the truth is buried in favor of propaganda.

Remember this while taking in the media coverage for the remainder of the hurricane season.