"Did Exxon Make It Rain Today?" -- Recommended Reading #1

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It is accurate that humanity's emissions have helped boost world temperatures over the past half-century. Droughts may have worsened in some areas. But -- in spite of what the mainstream media has told us -- there is little evidence that storms have gotten worse. 

Ted Nordhaus has penned a four-part series (with an outstanding title) that explains how Big Climate has manipulated the facts to make politicians and people believe what isn't true -- that storms have gotten worse and will only get worse in the future. 

Two under-engineered and long-neglected dams in the divided country of Libya, racked for years by civil war, fail, sending a torrent of flood water into a large city and killing thousands. While Lahaina, Hawaii, is ablaze, Maui authorities fail to send out an evacuation warning and close the main road out of the city, as fire hydrants run dry amid years-long fights over water supply, resulting in a hundred avoidable deaths. Katrina, a strong but not exceptional hurricane*, makes landfall over New Orleans, a city that sits mostly below sea level with a large low-income population living in the shadow of levees that haven’t been properly built or maintained, killing well over a thousand.

These disasters were human-caused. But the human causes that turned these extreme events into terrible disasters were failures of infrastructure and institutions. Climate change was not the decisive factor.

One would be hard-pressed to glean this crucial distinction from media outlets like the New York Times, the Associated Press, and CNN. Seemingly every day, we are bombarded by news of yet another extreme weather event that is attributed to climate change. And while there is evidence that climate change is influencing some of these events, the role it is playing in most of them has been reliably exaggerated.

Couldn't have written it better myself. 


The entire piece is worth reading. I'll add a couple of thoughts:

  • The excerpt above solidly reinforces the need for a Natural Disaster Review Board. Consider all of the mistakes made on Maui (there were more than those listed) and there were also serious mistakes in Katrina. Only a NDRB can break this tragic cycle.
  • The big money is on the side of global warming catastrophism. Those of us trying to educate the public as to the truth have a very difficult time. Climate change is the only 'science' with focus groups, marketing firms, etc., with budgets to match. It is "sold" to the public like toothpaste. 
  • The rise in temperatures is a serious issue that deserves a serious response. But, like too much of what occurs in America today, graft leads to wind and solar being installed when it should be nuclear. We are literally spending trillions and getting little in return. 
*For clarity, Katrina was a Cat 5 when it was in the central Gulf, it was a Cat 3 when it brushed New Orleans. 

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