True or false: Harvey was more intense because of global warming
Hurricane Harvey presented a golden opportunity to global warming hysterics who are trying mightily to connect the storm’s intensity to climate change.
What’s truly remarkable is that reporting that is pushing this meme always start out the same way; they deny they are trying to connect hurricanes to global warming:
Scientists are habitually cautious about attributing a single weather event to the long-term increase in global temperature that human beings have begun, and they cannot say with reasonable certainty that climate change caused Hurricane Harvey. In fact, they are still sorting out exactly how global warming affects hurricane formation. It seems likely that an increase in North Atlantic hurricanes is linked to climate change, but scientists cannot confidently rule out some other factor.
Translation: We don’t know what causes hurricanes or how they work or even how global warming is supposed to affect hurricanes. But we “know” that global warming is responsible for something.
But hurricanes have always been devastating and deadly, especially in the Gulf of Mexico. Let’s take the quintessential example, the Great Galveston Hurricane of 1900. (By the way, from what I saw in my work with tree rings, 1900 was one of the hottest years ever in the West.) 6,000 to 12,000 dead — it was so bad they couldn’t accurately count — and over 3,600 homes destroyed.
And this was early in the increase in people and wealth in the area. If the Great Galveston Hurricane had come a few years later, even if it had been a weaker hurricane, the death and destruction would have been even worse.
Oops! I am not allowed to say that. Damn. There goes my climate science career.
Roger A. Pielke Jr. argued exactly this, that the increasing damage from hurricanes was due to this increase in “wealth density” and not an increase in hurricane intensity or frequency, which themselves were not proven and then assumed without proof to be due to global warming.
Harvey was a category 4 storm (out of 5) when it hit the Texas coast with sustained winds of 130 mph. That’s a big, strong storm to be sure. But the “intensity” of the storm is being measured by the damage it does. As th author points out, that’s entirely bogus because the storm struck a densely populated area. Fewer people means less damage, thus, less “intensity.”
Beyond that, the author destroys the narrative that you can “prove” climate change from a single weather event:
“It is a fundamental fact, although increasingly conveniently ignored, that no single climate event or location can be attributed to global warming. There is simply no valid way to prove a connection and correlation is not causation. If it were, the following would be true: As global warming has supposedly been occurring, the average human lifespan has significantly increased. Therefore, global warming causes increased human lifespans and is a good thing.”
Climate change, as it is advanced by its proponents is not science, it’s an argument. As such, we are capable of dissecting that argument and exposing its many flaws. The actual scientific evidence that man is responsible for warming the earth since the beginning of the industrial age is not compelling enough to “prove” the hypothesis, so the pseudo-scientific argument is substituted instead.
For those predisposed to believe the argument, the “evidence” presented is “overwhelming” or “undeniable.” But it’s always good to keep in mind that simple logic is an antidote to wrongheaded thinking.
Read more at American Thinker
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