Sunday, August 28, 2011

A Weather Newsgasm


By Alan Caruba

What major weather events and especially earthquakes tell us is that we live on planet Earth on its terms, not ours. Put another way, we don’t “control” the weather or climate and, despite decades of global warming lies, compared to the sun and oceans, we don’t even influence it.

The best definition of the weather is “chaos.” It will do whatever it wants to do.

By Friday on Fox News and other television news outlets, it was non-stop coverage of Hurricane Irene even though it was barely beginning to touch the North Carolina coast. If there is one thing the news media loves it is a really big potential disaster.

By Saturday afternoon as Irene passed over North Carolina, Anthony Watts, a veteran meteorologist and commentator on WattsUpWithThat.com, was reporting, “What we have here at this point appears to be a tropical storm. By the time it reaches New York, it may very well just be a tropical depression on par with a Nor’easter in intensity.” But not a hurricane.

At one point late Saturday, I clicked the remote on every local channel and on every cable news channel. Every single one was reporting on the hurricane. According to my blogger pal, Texas Fred, that’s a “newsgasm”.

By Sunday morning, the drenching rain, but no high winds, was already moving north out of New York City and northern New Jersey where I live.

The incessant “news” coverage reflects the way television (and print) news professionals tend to regard viewers as too stupid to make decisions as basic as preparing for the hurricane or evacuating before its arrival, nor do they just report the news, i.e., the facts. So far as Irene was concerned, they engaged in massive speculation and endless predictions.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) became an acronym for incompetence. Presumably lessons have been learned and the agency will perform more effectively if needed.

Americans have been taught that the federal government will always come to their rescue and it rarely does with any efficiency and usually with a great waste of money and resources. Local first responders are usually the best and most reliable.

In a society that is utterly and completely dependent on electricity to function, it is always a sobering experience for many to discover how useless every single appliance in their home or apartment becomes without it.

I am sure I am boring people to death by repeatedly pointing to the way government at the federal and state level, along with many environmental organizations are deliberately making it difficult, if not impossible, to build coal-burning or nuclear utilities. As for transportation, the same forces are allied against any oil exploration and extraction. There hasn’t been a single new oil refinery built since the 1970s. That’s insane.

Now they are gearing up to deter natural gas extraction using “fracking” even though this technology has been in safe use for fifty years. The discovery of vast new reserves of natural gas should be greeted as welcome news by everyone. Only the luddites want us to return to mythical “simpler” times that never existed. It is still easier and a whole lot faster to take the train from New York to Washington, D.C. than to ride a horse.

If a foreign invader had imposed the same limits on our ability to access and use our own vast national reserves of coal, oil and natural gas, we would be in the streets with metaphorical pitchforks.

Returning to the theme of hurricanes, does anyone remember how Al Gore and other global warming liars were predicting that global warming would cause more hurricanes? Well, the East Coast has been through a period of some five years without one making landfall. Since there never was any dramatic global warming, there never was a connection between the two.

It’s worth remembering the previous decades since the late 1980s that were filled with reports from the full panoply of the print and broadcast media. They assured us that global warming was going to transform all life on earth unless we stopped producing carbon dioxide emissions, i.e., “greenhouse gas” emissions. It was a scam to sell bogus “carbon credits.”

This is the same bull we keep hearing about “renewable” energy, wind and solar power, along with ethanol and biofuels. The latter wastes food—corn—and the former wastes open space along with taxpayer’s and consumer’s hard earned money.

We are constantly assailed with extremely dubious, if not outright lies that involve something “scientific”, but science has been corrupted with too much environmental claptrap, political correctness, and devious chicanery. There are good sources of information, but the government and the media are not among them.

Trust your common sense. It is usually a good guide.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

15 comments:

Lobsterman said...

Science is supposed to be based on facts !!!, but apparently many people refuse to look at the facts of how they criminally doctored the reports about global warming !!!. Even many of the head scientists that helped to develop those peer reviewed studies have now come out publicly to admit that it was all part of a giant fraud !!!. Lies designed to steal away people's right's and resource's.

One of the mantras of todays wanna be scientists is "to err on the side of the enviroment". The problem with that is " that to err at all, is not science at all !!!". In fact it completely detracts any credibility, and objectivity that true scientists are supposed to have. When you train and school science and enviromental majors to think alike, you no longer have science, you have an agenda with alterior motives !!!.

Seamusdubh said...

I love the statement that there has been a steady increase in the number of storm (hurricane, storm or depression) in recent history. But what they seem to leave out is the advancements in technology that have increased our ability to see them. (radar that has longer range and finer resolution, satellites to see storms that would have never been seen by or made land.)
I wonder how the stats might look if we compare them through the lenses of old.

Necromancer said...

But,but,but, Alan is sells ads and newspapers for the print media and the LSM and it also scares people half to death the same as the globul warming hoax. I'm glad you didn't get hit to hard and escaped as you said it never even got close.

Carmen said...

Hear, hear!!

Anonymous said...

Newsgasm -- (snicker snicker)

Re-posting on my blog too, linked of course...

Alan Caruba said...

@TexasFred: I always give credit where credit is due.

Thank you for the post and link.

There is a slight breeze outside...do I dare actually go outside...it is soooooo scary.

Alan Caruba said...

Thank you everyone for your comments. Well said!

Dave's Daily Day Dream said...

Today, even "science" looks for consensus. These "scientists" are the product of John Dewey's dream educational system. The folks I know who are a part of the problem are now covering their collective rear-ends so as to not look bad in public. What a scam it has been! There's much more to come.

the Tunnel Dweller said...

So true that Democrats and the environmental movement are doing more damage to the American economy than the Soviets or any terrorists could have ever hoped.
An American electorate that swims in a sea of liberal thought has been made complicit in this PC culture.

Anonymous said...

Had Hurricane Irene happened a bit later in the season they could have named it *Snooki*… An ugly, fat blowhard that’s WAY over rated... Just sayin'...

Anonymous said...

If you live in the dessert you know it's going to be hot... If you live in most ANY spot in middle America you know there will be storms and tornadoes... If you live in California you know there's going to be a quake from time to time... If you build your home on the coast or in a below sea level area and you have a hurricane, you KNOW there will be damage and flooding... It's NOT news, it's life, DEAL WITH IT!

I have a cousin that lives on Galveston Island, when Ike blew his place away he was terribly upset... Guess where he rebuilt and lives now? Yep, same spot, and the insurance paid for it... Wonderful...

Travis sez said...

"If a foreign invader had imposed the same limits on our ability to access and use our own vast national reserves of coal, oil and natural gas, we would be in the streets with metaphorical pitchforks." Ah, but what if a Manchurian Candidate did the same? City folk have no pitch-forks these days.

Alan Caruba said...

@Travis:
"Metaphorical" pitchforks.

One more reason the Second Amendment must be protected against encroachments.

m_astera said...

The hype about the non-hurricane was media noise to cover what was really happening in Libya. Got that?

I have no problem with coal, oil, or gas. Think they are great. Nuclear power plants have the unfortunate problem of creating toxins that weren't in the environment before the fission process began. Nasty ones too. Most don't realize that Iodine 131 is made by the process of heating water with Uranium fission. Same with the Plutonium, the Cesium, the Strontium. Made, get that?

Think that's an intelligent application of science, all to boil water? I don't.

LarryOldtimer said...

I am a retired highway/transportation engineer.

When I look at the estimates of the costs of restoring at-grade highways and other roads because of Hurricane Irene (still going up fast), I shudder.

What hasn't been mentioned is the extreme amount of time before many of the highways can be restored to the point of being even traversable.

The wheels of commerce have large trucks over them. It is my opinion that the damage to the very economies of these northeast states will be immense. Time is money.