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

Standing Firm Against a Hurricane of Lies

By Alan Caruba

It takes a substantial amount of courage to stand against the lies about global warming, carbon dioxide’s (CO2) role in climate change, and whether humans are causing unusual weather events, but Dr. William Gray has been doing that ever since the global warming hoax was unleashed on the world in the 1980s.

In January 2010, after having been a member of the American Meteorological Society (AMS) for more than fifty years, Dr. Gray, a Professor Emeritus at Colorado State University, wrote a stinging denunciation when the society gave its highest award to James Hansen, the NASA official generally credited with getting the global warming hoax rolling in 1988 with testimony before Congress.

“I am appalled at the selection of James Hansen as this year’s recipient of the AMS’s highest award—the Rossby Research Medal. James Hansen has not been trained as a meteorologist. His formal education has been in astronomy. His long records of faulty global climate predictions and alarmist public pronouncements have become increasingly hollow and at odds with reality.”

At an age when most men might be expected to rest on their laurels, Dr. Gray has not shrunk from the battle. Slapping down Hansen, he said, “He cannot explain why there has been no significant global warming over the last ten years and why there has been a weak global cooling between 2001 and 2008.”

What is generally unknown and unseen by the public is that in the world of science there are fierce battles waged within its many cohorts as both sides of an issue lay out their data and submit themselves to the scrutiny of other scientists. These battles often last for decades. Darwin’s theory, though widely accepted by the public, is still being debated with the likelihood that it too will be upended by the study of magnetic reversals.

I am pleased to call Dr. Gray a friend. I first took notice of him for his annual predictions of hurricane activity. I suspect that professional poker players, for whom the odds are weighed hand by hand, would stand in awe of anyone prognosticating on the number of hurricanes that would hit the east coast in any given year.

World Climate Report recently asked, “How much evidence will it take to quiet the claim that hurricanes are increasing in frequency due to global warming?” They found “scant evidence to support a strong link”, something that Dr. Gray has been saying for decades.

In 2006 The Wall Street Journal took notice in a page one article titled, “Hurricane Debate Shatters Civility of Weather Service.” Dr. Gray had been disinvited from being on a panel to discuss the storms, several of whose members were still arguing the idiotic notion that human activity has anything to do with these powerful climate events.

The lesson here is that major science-based organizations such as the AMS, along with government weather service agencies such as NASA, have been deliberately misleading Americans for years.

Dr. Gray has been indefatigable in his resistance to the torrent of misinformation. To those government scientists putting forth the global warming alarmism, Dr. Gray has written that “Rising levels of CO2 are not near the threat these alarmists have portrayed them to be. There has yet to be an honest and broad scientific debate on the basic science of CO2’s influence on global temperature.”

“The global climate models predicting large amounts of global warming for a doubling of CO2 are badly flawed. They should never have been used to establish government climate policy.”

It is climate policy that is driving the Obama administration’s effort to pass the Cap-and-Trade Act, a huge tax on all energy use. It is climate policy that is driving the Environmental Protection Agency’s crude, thuggish effort to regulate carbon dioxide (CO2) and when the President speaks of climate change as related to human activity he is lying.

I trust Dr. Gray’s half century of research and analysis. You should, too.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

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

Where are the Hurricanes, Mr. Gore?

By Alan Caruba

That god among men and Nobel Peace Prize winner, Al Gore, told us in “An Inconvenient Truth”, his Oscar-winning documentary, that we had to brace for increasing numbers of hurricanes as the result of global warming.

So, where are the hurricanes of 2009, Mr. Gore?

The hurricane season that runs from June through November is about to end with nothing more than one weak to borderline moderate tropical storm that hit Florida’s panhandle, but there have been NO hurricanes; at least none that made landfall.

So, where are the hurricanes of 2009, Mr. Gore?

Trying to predict how many hurricanes there will be each year is probably fun, but is a highly risky undertaking. I have a lot of friends among the meteorological and climatological community, men of science, but I always cross my fingers for them when they take a run at it.

This year, Bill Gray of Colorado State, perhaps the best known among the hurricane forecasters, thought there would be at least 7 hurricanes of which 3 would be major. Weather Services Inc. agreed with Dr. Gray and, over at Accuweather, the prediction was for 8 hurricanes of which 2 would be major.

NOAA and the National Weather Service do not predict hurricanes, but as political as well as scientific entities they have a very bad track record of trying to confirm Al Gore’s global warming claims.

In March, William J. Broad, reporting in The New York Times, noted that Gore’s “scientific audience is uneasy” in the wake of his global warming documentary. “These scientists argue that some of Mr. Gore’s central points are exaggerated and erroneous. They are alarmed, some say, at what they call his alarmism.”

In Great Britain, a judge ruled that the documentary could not be shown in the schools unless teachers read a long list of its erroneous claims.

Since an increase in hurricanes was one of his dramatic claims along with rising sea levels and disappearing polar bears, Gore is batting zero these days. The sea levels have been rising a few inches every century for millennia and it is generally conceded that the polar bear population since the 1950s has been thriving.

In May, hurricane specialist Chris Landsea of the National Hurricane Center in Miami disputed theories that “global warming” has caused more hurricanes. His study was published in The Journal of Climate.

Landsea, like all meteorologists who haven’t been in a coma since the 1980s, knows that the Earth has been in a cooling cycle since 1998. Thus, the warmth that feeds hurricanes has diminished and is likely to stay that way for decades to come.

Landsea’s research showed that, since the mid-1990s, the average number of hurricanes per year had almost doubled what it was during the few prior decades, about on par with hurricane activity in the early 20th century. “It’s busy, yes, but not anything we haven’t seen before,” said Landsea while attending the Florida Governor’s Hurricane Conference in May.

For the non-scientist, that should confirm that hurricanes are governed by natural cycles, not some non-existent, dramatic increase called “global warming.”

Though what I know about hurricanes would fit comfortably in a bug’s ear, I am nonetheless tempted to suggest that the cooling cycle the Earth entered in 1998 may be a contributing factor to why this year’s hurricane season is, at this writing, minus any hurricanes.

So, where are the hurricanes of 2009, Mr. Gore?

Known as “the Gore factor”, it is the irony of blizzards or severe snow storms that seem to follow him around whenever he delivered one of his “global warming” speeches.

It is my profound prayer that, in December when the United Nations climate conference convenes to issue an international treaty based on the Great Global Warming Lie, that the city of Copenhagen gets hit by a blizzard so great that the delegates cannot leave their plush hotels for days.

How Many Dead in Galveston?

By Alan Caruba

Here’s a question for you. Given the many people who refused to leave Galveston, Texas, how many died as the result of Hurricane Ike?

If you cannot find any reports than you are not alone. There is a virtual news blackout regarding casualties and deaths from the devastation the hurricane inflicted on Galveston.

The official death toll, according to an Associated Press, September 17, report was 49 “with most of the deaths coming outside of Texas.” The same report cited nine deaths in the Houston-area, but there was no word from Galveston, a place that currently resembles the surface of the Moon.

The most recent news report about Galveston that I could find was on the MSNBC website, updated as of Sunday. It cited two cases of Texans killed by the storm without reference to Galveston. It may have been too soon to know, but by Wednesday, there still was no word.

The hurricane reportedly killed more than 80 people in the Caribbean before reaching the United States. It was huge; some 500 miles across, with a storm surge that easily topped Galveston’s seawall. And yet, despite an occasional glimpse of the devastation it left behind, there is still no word of any deaths in Galveston.

“Homes and other buildings in Galveston and homes burned unattended during the height of Ike’s fury; 17 collapsed because crews couldn’t get to them to douse the flames. There was no water or electricity on the island…” according to the Sunday MSNBC report.

It seems unlikely, given the number of residents who chose to remain despite the order to evacuate, that there are no reports of deaths or of missing persons. The mainstream news media’s lack of interest, given the ferocity of the hurricane, is curious.

It could be that many of the dead were washed out to sea and a toll may never be known, but surely some of those who remained behind were killed and initial cleanup and rescue efforts should have yielded their bodies. If this is the case, it is not being reported.

One would think that either a Texas state agency or FEMA would make some kind of announcement, but so far the silence is beyond any explanation. One finds nothing on their websites.

Are government agencies reluctant to provide such information, given the backlash that occurred in the wake of Hurricane Katrina? Would a significant death toll in Galveston or anywhere affected by Hurricane Ike raise new questions about the ability of States and FEMA to respond?

Or did the evacuation and other efforts work so well that, miraculously, Galveston has few fatalities? We’re still waiting to know.

On Whom Can We Blame the Hurricane?

By Alan Caruba

I am waiting for some moron in Obama’s campaign team to announce that the devastation of Hurricane Ike is the fault of the Bush administration.

Worse yet, I am waiting for some moron in McCain’s campaign team to say something stupid about “global warming” as the reason for the hurricane. Since the Earth has been in a cooling cycle now for the passed ten years, you can be fairly certain that (a) there is no global warming and (b) there’s no connection to the recent hurricanes.

As to what is “causing” them, the answer is the same thing that has been causing them for millions of years, Mother Nature. Those of us on the East Coast and in the Gulf area are now in a “hurricane season” and it will remain in it through October.

What is most evident, however, is that, with the advent of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, these storms are getting larger and more devastating. Anyone who lives in Florida is accustomed to hurricanes blowing through. Once in a decade or so, they get one like Hurricane Andrew that does some real damage, but most just rearrange the patio furniture. Further up the coast in the Carolinas they got a nasty Hurricane Hugo some years ago.

This new century has begun with a bang. Two monster storms in the first eight years suggests that these are not random events, but likely to occur with more frequency. This is very bad news for the Gulf States, but it is really bad news for Americans who depend on refineries in Texas and Louisiana for the bulk of the gasoline and other petroleum distillates they produce.

Now I have a confession to make. For some time now I have been making fun of those meteorologists who have been forecasting how many hurricanes will occur. The reason for this is that they have been mostly wrong for the last two or three years.

In April 2008, however, the Colorado State University team trained and put together by Dr. William Gray predicted at least 15 named storms that would grow into hurricanes, including “four intense hurricanes with winds about 110 mph.” In May I was poking fun at AccuWeather’s Joe Bastardi who had a comparable hurricane forecast. Bastardi has forgotten more about meteorology than I will ever know. I should have listened.

We should all listen when Dr. Gray, now an emeritus professor, tells us that those scientists still claiming that global warming is real are “brainwashing our children.” They brainwashed a jury of British morons who last week delivered a verdict that said it is perfectly okay for environmental activists to vandalize and destroy property in the name of global warming.

Simply stated, there’s no one to blame for Hurricane Ike or any other weather event.

It’s what planet Earth does and if you are still thinking that human beings have the slightest impact or effect on the weather, I have some lovely oceanfront property to sell you in Galveston, Texas. Or New Orleans. Or Biloxi.

The next person who says it’s all because of “climate change” should be dragged out into the street and told not to come back until they grow up.

That’s what the climate does all the time. It changes! Most of the time it’s seasonal. Other times it’s multidecadel. Barely 15,000 years ago, most of the northern continent lay beneath huge glaciers thanks to the most recent ice age.

When winter arrives, I’m betting that the same ferocity we’re seeing this hurricane season will translate into some horrendous blizzards, the likes of which we have not seen with frequency in passed years.

Is it time to build more refineries someplace where hurricanes do not occur with regularity? Yes.

It is time to build more coal-fired and nuclear plants to generate the doubling of electricity we will need by 2030? Yes.

Is it time to explore and extract the vast reserves of oil and natural gas off the coasts of America? Yes.

Can we depend on Congress to do the right thing? No. Not unless and until we begin to elect people to office who understand these very simple facts will we have any hope at all.

A Message from Mother Nature

By Alan Caruba

Hurricane Gustav is just another example of Mother Nature’s basic message to mankind.

“Get out of the way!”

Here comes a hurricane.

Here comes a blizzard.

Here comes a tornado.

Here comes a flood.

Here comes an earthquake.

Here comes a forest fire.

Here comes a volcano.

“Get out of the way!”

And that is what thousands in the path of Gustav are doing, having learned the lessons of the last Category Five hurricane, Katrina. A lot of people in the New Orleans area, not to forget Mobile and a huge swath of coastal and inland areas, just didn’t pay attention to Mother Nature in 2005. Three years later they are heading for the high ground.

“Get out of the way!”

It is astounding to me that, after all the history of mankind and the accumulated knowledge of the impact that climate and natural events have had on that history, there are still people--environmentalists--running around telling us that we are in control of the climate and we can “save” the planet.

These people purposefully ignore the role of the greatest star in our galaxy, the Sun. They ignore the role of the oceans. They ignore the role of clouds. These and other factors totally beyond the control of mankind will decide the future of the planet.

A magnetic reversal, an event that has occurred in the past history of the Earth, would wreak havoc on modern technology and civilization as we know it.

If the Earth was to tilt slightly--an event that turned lush jungles of northern Africa into the Sahara Desert--that too would impact mankind.

We are all in need of a great deal of humility when it comes to Nature. We can appreciate it. We can strive to be good stewards of where we live, but in the end it is Nature itself that will determine our fate.

We are not in charge!

All we can do is pile into our cars, get on buses, planes and trains, and get the hell out of the way!

Be Afraid. Be Very Afraid.

By Alan Caruba

Enemies of Energy: A November 30 news release from Friends of the Earth announces that this environmental group “has been working behind the scenes to kill a provision in the Democrat’s energy bill that would force taxpayers to underwrite a new generation of nuclear reactors.”

It does not mention that taxpayer’s are forced to underwrite the production of ethanol, a gasoline additive that is (1) driving up the cost of driving your car and all 3,000 products that involve the use of corn, (2) that ethanol generates less energy efficient than gasoline, and (3) provides no savings to the consumer because it requires so much energy to produce it.

However, at a time when all the politicians keep telling us that America must become “energy independent” and “reduce greenhouse emissions”, a leading environmental organization is lobbying hard against subsidies that would encourage the building of nuclear facilities to provide the electricity a nation of 300 million people will need. Nuclear facilities are famously non-polluting.

In a nation in which subsidies to agriculture and all kinds of industrial activities are commonplace, Friends of the Earth is opposed to those which will provide the energy we must have to remain economically competitive and provide for the needs of a growing population.

Nanny Government: We now hear that the Food and Drug Administration wants to regulate the amount of salt (sodium) in our diets. Since when did we cede the right to decide what we eat and how much to the federal government?

Even if it is true that 75% of the salt the average American consumes comes from processed foods and restaurant meals, where is it written in the Constitution that the federal government can and must regulate this? I am all for the FDA protecting Americans against drugs that may harm health and food that may pose a threat, but there’s a big difference between ensuring that meat is not diseased and deciding just how much salt an individual may consume.

There’s a reason there is a high percentage of sodium in packaged foods. Since ancient times it has been known that salt is a preservative, protecting food against spoilage, and it also adds to the taste of food.

I am sure we shall hear numbers cited as to how many people die every year from too much salt in their diet, but one should be suspicious of such statistics as they generally leave out a lot of other factors that may well have also contributed to high blood pressure—such as a genetic inclination in some families towards this—and the fact that many of the people who are said to have died from too much salt may well have died from something else.

Hurricane Hysterics: What do we know as the annual hurricane season comes to an end? We know that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), along with some meteorologists who have gained recognition for their predictions of how many hurricanes will occur both got the 2007 predictions wrong.

The National Center for Public Policy Research, in a November 30 news release, believes that NOAA “is inflating the count of tropical storms and aiding a political campaign to regulate energy use in the process.” It notes that 2007 is the second year in a row that NOAA got its predictions wrong.

We need to understand that there have always been hurricanes as part of the earth’s bounty of disasters that afflict human beings. There were hurricanes before there even were human beings. They are a natural part of the earth’s climate system, so except for the problems they cause whether there are more or less of them has absolutely nothing to do with global warming because there is no dramatic or unusual global warming. The earth has warmed about one degree Fahrenheit since the end of the last mini ice age around 1850.

And, yes, hurricanes have become politicized in the effort by environmentals to convince everyone the earth is doomed.

I like to tell people that Mother Nature’s message to humans is “Get out of the way! Here comes a hurricane, a tornado, a flood, an earthquake, a blizzard, a wild fire, et cetera.

Where are the Hurricanes?

Where are all the hurricanes that "global warming" is supposed to create? So far this year none have made landfall anywhere in the United States though two did churn up the Gulf of Mexico and crossed into that nation. It is October already and the hurricane season will end on November 30 so maybe we've just gotten "lucky" or maybe the "global warming" connection is as spurious as meteorologists say it is?

As this is written, the weather in the tri-state area is an astounding 80 degrees or so. Admittedly unusual for October, but that's the thing about the weather, except in the most general terms, it is impossible to predict short term or long.

By all known factors, the United States should be into at least a decade of serious hurricane activity, but except for Katrina and Ruby in 2005, the East Coast and Gulf area has been mostly spared. Will, like 2006, this year go into the books as defying the experts and prognosticators?

Let's hope so!

In the meantime, you might want to pay a visit to http://www.iceagenow.com