The Left Will Blame Trump for Hurricane Harvey

Before Hurricane Harvey even made landfall on the Texas coast, what Sean Hannity calls the “Destroy Trump Media” was already condemning President Trump’s handling of this natural disaster. No doubt Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accords will soon be blamed for this and every other natural disaster. As Salon shrieked:

Hurricane Harvey is predicted to be the first major storm in a decade -- and Trump just tweeted a useless promotional ad in preparation.

According to the White House, Trump was briefed on the government’s hurricane preparation efforts earlier this month, but his campaign-style commercial -- fitted with a dramatic soundtrack -- failed to convey any of that information to worried residents in the storm’s path. His tweet did not include basic information, like who is in danger, how to be prepared or what the government is doing to prepare.

Trump will undoubtedly be blamed for everything in Harvey’s aftermath and for ignoring climate change’s alleged causation of Hurricane Harvey. The media coverage and liberal commentary will no doubt parallel the media hysteria which blamed President George W. Bush for Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, ignoring that a Democratic Louisiana governor and Democratic New Orleans mayor had both the responsibility and the blame for how the state and city responded. Investor’s Business Daily editorialized about a “Media Bias of Hurricane Proportions”:

(NBC News’ Chuck) Todd, like the media during their original Katrina Bush-bashing, ignore the fact that much of the Katrina snafus should have been laid at the feet of New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin, a Democrat, and the equally clueless Democratic governor of Louisiana, Kathleen Babineaux Blanco.

Fact is, President Bush declared the state of Louisiana a disaster area 48 hours before Katrina made landfall and asked Blanco to order a mandatory evacuation of New Orleans on Aug. 27, a full two days before the hurricane hit.

Neither Blanco nor Nagin ordered city buses to help evacuate those residents who couldn't leave on their own even though the city's own emergency plan mandated it and acknowledged there were at least 100,000 people who couldn't make it out without help….

After not evacuating the city, the Louisiana Department of Homeland Security blocked a convoy of Red Cross trucks filled with water, food, blankets and hygiene items from the New Orleans Superdome after Katrina struck. The rationale: It would have encouraged refugees to stay there.

No doubt Harvey will be painted by the media and the alt-left as Trump’s Katrina and blame Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accords for this disaster. The fact is that hurricanes and other weather events such as tornados are not increasing in intensity or frequency are not due to manmade influences but rather part of a natural cycle influenced by many things such as ocean currents. As Roger Pielke Jr., of the University of Colorado at Boulder notes:

The world is presently in an era of unusually low weather disasters. This holds for the weather phenomena that have historically caused the most damage: tropical cyclones, floods, tornadoes and drought. Given how weather events have become politicized in debates over climate change, some find this hard to believe...

A good place to start is with tropical cyclones, given that they are often the most costly weather events to occur each year.  The figure below shows global tropical cyclone landfalls from 1990 through 2016. These are the storms that cause the overwhelming majority of property damage. Since 1990 there has been a reduction of about 3 landfalling storms per year…

Even more striking is the extended period in the United States, which has the most exposure to tropical cyclone damage, without the landfall of an intense hurricane. The figure below shows the number of days between each landfall of a Category 3 hurricane in the US, starting in 1900. As of this writing (July 31, 2017) the tally is approaching 4500 days, which is a streak of good fortune not seen in the historical record.

One of the tenets of the global warmers is that global warming is the result of the climate denier’s indifference to it is causing an escalation in hurricane frequency and intensity. The inconvenient truth is that settled science says hurricane frequency and intensity have little or nothing to do with man’s impact on climate:

Major categories 3, 4 and 5 hurricanes are relatively rare. If you check out the website of the National Hurricane Center (www.nhc.noaa.gov/pastdec.shtml?), you'll find that the most active hurricane decade was 1941-50 -- recording 24 hurricanes, with 10 of them being giant category 3, 4 and 5 hurricanes. The peak for major hurricanes (categories 3, 4 5) came in the decades of the 1890s, 1930s and 1940s -- an average of nine per decade. Of the 92 giant hurricanes that have struck the U.S. mainland between 1851 and 2004, 61 of them occurred before 1950, long before global warming was an issue…

Stanley Goldenberg, a meteorologist at the Hurricane Research Division of the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration, says, "Katrina is part of a well-documented, multidecadal scale fluctuation in hurricane activity. This cycle was described in a heavily cited article printed in the journal Science in 2001." His colleague Chris Landsea agrees, saying, "If you look at the raw hurricane data itself, there is no global warming signal. What we see instead is a strong cycling of activity. There are periods of 25 to 40 years where it's very busy and then periods of 25 to 40 years when it's very quiet."

About the connection between hurricanes and global warming, Goldenberg concludes, "I speak for many hurricane climate researchers in saying such claims are nonsense." The bottom line for President Bush is that unless he's God, he shouldn't accept the blame for Hurricane Katrina.

Neither should Trump be blamed for hurricanes or Harvey, but he undoubtedly will. Hurricanes appear to be getting worse and more frequent because we now live in an age of 24-hour cable news and the fact that Americans have increasingly flocked to coastal areas to live.

President Trump was right in deciding that the only way to make America great again is to renounce the Paris Climate Accords as the scripture of a false climate change religion. The Accords would doom Trump’s plans to resurrect American energy production and liberate fossil fuels from the chains of regulation. It would make no sense to agree to the Accords after ending the war on coal and relieving industry, particularly the energy industry, from oppressive and job-killing regulations.

Yes, the earth has been warming. It has been warming ever since the Little Ice Age. That is a good thing, Crops love CO2 and longer growing seasons -- good news for a hungry world. The fact is that global temperatures have essentially flatlined in the past two decades.

Recently published data from independent meteorologists Dr Ryan Maue of WeatherBELL Analytics and Dr Roy Spencer show that global temperatures have fallen back to about the levels of 20 years ago despite our alleged gushing of CO2…

The explanation of the temperature pause since 1998 -- which contradicts the computer models used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) -- has been the subject of widespread discussion in academic journals, including the American Geophysical Union journal, Geophysical Research Letters, as well as Climate Dynamics, and the Scientific Report of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. All agree that temperature rises have stalled, but there is no consensus on the cause.

Dr Roy Spencer publishes every month the average global temperature derived from satellite observations. Since 1979, satellites have been sending back to earth data on the temperature of the lower atmosphere, and this data is published by the University of Alabama, Huntsville (UAH) and on Dr Spencer’s website.

The satellite data indicates that average temperatures in April 2017 were 0.27 degrees above the 30-year average from 1981–2010. In the previous month, the data showed that the temperature was just 0.19 degrees above the 30-year average. The IPCC had forecast temperature variations five to 10 times as large.

William Happer, Cyrus Fogg Brocket Professor of Physics, Emeritus, at Princeton University, writes in the Washington Times that CO2, which every human being exhales, is a blessing and not a curse:

Climate has been changing since the Earth was formed -- some 4.5 billion years ago -- according to geological evidence. Climate changes on every time scale -- decades, centuries, millennia and even longer periods.

The climate of Greenland really was warm enough for farming around the year 1100, and the Little Ice Age really did drive Norse settlers out of Greenland by the year 1500. Like these changes, the very minor warming we have had over the past few centuries is mostly from non-human causes.

Each human exhales about two pounds of CO2 a day from simply being alive. Living creatures, humans, animals and plants are largely made of carbon. Carbon dioxide is essential to the growth of plants. By the standards of geological history, plants have been coping with a CO2 famine for several tens of millions of years. Satellites already show dramatic greening of the Earth as CO2 levels begin recovery toward their historical norms. These were measured in thousands of parts per million (ppm), not today’s puny 400 ppm.

President Trump has rightly made a crusade against unfair trade deals. The Paris Climate Accord is an economic disaster which has more to do with the global elites gain control over the world’s economy. They want to control and regulate the means of production and dictate every minute aspect of our daily lives -- just as President Obama sought to do. Hey, isn’t that the classic definition of Marxism?

Global warming hype is nothing more an attempt by climate change scammers to impose what has become a religion. MIT Professor Richard Lindzen is quoted in the Daily Caller questioning the tenets of this new religion:

Throughout history, governments have twisted science to suit a political agenda. Global warming is no different, according to Dr. Richard Lindzen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“Global climate alarmism has been costly to society, and it has the potential to be vastly more costly. It has also been damaging to science, as scientists adjust both data and even theory to accommodate politically correct positions,” writes Lindzen in the fall 2013 issue of the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons….

Lindzen compares global warming to past politicized scientific movements: the eugenics movement in the early 20th Century and Lysenkoism in the Soviet Union under Stalin. However, the MIT professor argues that global warming goes even beyond what these past movements in terms of twisting science.

“Global Warming has become a religion,” writes Lindzen. “A surprisingly large number of people seem to have concluded that all that gives meaning to their lives is the belief that they are saving the planet by paying attention to their carbon footprint.”

In truth, the only danger we face is from the hot air spewed by climate change zealots who have politicized science and used false claims to attempt to repeal and replace the Industrial Revolution.

Daniel John Sobieski is a freelance writer whose pieces have appeared in Investor’s Business Daily, Human Events, Reason Magazine and the Chicago Sun-Times among other publications.            

If you experience technical problems, please write to helpdesk@americanthinker.com