Hurricane Humility

By Alan Caruba

Who among us can remember back, oh so long ago, when Hurricane Earl was a Category 4, just one degree shy of the Katrina’s astonishing destruction of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast States of Mississippi and Alabama?

Those of us on the East Coast were assured that Earl would smash into North Carolina’s the barrier islands, dash up toward Newark, New Jersey, and then onward to Nantucket and pretty much anywhere else Earl wanted to go. The predictions were ominous.

I live in New Jersey and it is late afternoon on Friday as this is being written. Not a drop of rain in sight. No doubt some will arrive later tonight, but Earl has veered out into the Atlantic and is just barely holding on to a Category 1 status.

How many hours did Fox News, the Weather Channel, and all the others devote to sensational satellite pictures of the Mighty Earl until, over the hours, it became apparent that those intrepid reporters waiting for it to come ashore were reduced to interviewing disgruntled surfers unhappy that they could not commit suicide in Earl’s surging waves?

This is what I keep telling people over and over again. The weather is the perfect definition of chaos. It will do what it wants to do and not what the geniuses sweating over “computer models” say it will do.

We humans in our suburbs and great cities are like tiny insects in its path. People that keep telling you that humans are altering the climate are lying to you.

That’s why we have to ask ourselves, if the meteorologists cannot predict what a Category 4 hurricane will do with more than a wisp of certainty, why should anyone listen to those charlatans who insist they know what the weather will be in five, ten, twenty or fifty years?

I’m not talking about legitimate climatologists who study trends over centuries, but the one’s that insist on transforming the economy and society out of their conceit that they know that “global warming” is coming and it’s going to be bad.

It’s not coming; the Earth has been cooling for the past decade. It is a perfectly natural and well-known cycle. It could stick around a few years. Or it could mutate into the next Ice Age.

Today my local daily newspaper had an editorial about global warming and why the skeptics are wrong. That is a level of denial and flat-out ignorance that defies reality.

The reality is that the most sophisticated weather forecasting computer models, along with weather satellites, did not know with any certainty what Hurricane Earl was going to do or go. It largely spared the East Coast and piddled off into the Atlantic. News at eleven.

I am glad the radio and television meteorologists tried to warn us and I am glad that the hurricane turned out to be far less destructive than anticipated, but I know they had no more idea than I what would occur.

© Alan Caruba, 2010