A recent story from the New York Times, “Why Summers May Never Be the Same,” seems to be another example of climate hysteria gone wild.  According to the article, “To many Americans, the season felt like a climate inflection point: a peek at what the country is facing in the future, and a new definition of summer.”  It was so hot, the author claimed, that children couldn’t play outside; some construction workers worked only at night; Arizona was unlivable; and even Vermont, with its summer flooding, did not escape unharmed.  And this, the author insists, is just the beginning.

My summer has not changed. It was hot, as it has been every year since I was born and raised in Oklahoma, worked in Tennessee and Japan, and retired in Florida.

Actually, the 1950s in Oklahoma, often referred to as the “Little Dust Bowl,” were hotter and drier than anything since.  There were half-inch cracks running through the baked earth, sidewalks hot enough to fry an egg, and no rain for 90 days.  But no one called it climate change.  It was doing what it had always done: another long, hot summer on the Great Plains.

According to climate “scientists,” one piece of evidence of climate change is an increase in the number and intensity of tropical storms.  In line with that theory, almost every spring, NOAA and other agencies issue warnings for stronger and more frequent storms, but usually those storms fail to materialize.

Despite excessive media coverage of Hurricane Idalia, that’s exactly what has happened so far in 2023.  There are no threatening Atlantic hurricanes forming at this time, and only one hurricane has made landfall so far.  That storm, a Category Three at landfall, soon weakened to a Category One — and the Florida death toll from that hurricane was precisely one, a person who died in a car accident related to storm flooding.

Cities like Sarasota and Tampa, and towns like Crystal River and Cedar Key, were inside Idalia’s cone and suffered from flooding, but the winds after landfall were relatively light and the damage relatively small (estimated at $2.5 to $5 billion overall).  Areas were evacuated along the Gulf Coast of Florida, many houses were damaged, and flooding was extensive, but Idalia was not a catastrophic hurricane.  Far from it.

One storm, one death.  So far this year, hurricanes have been pretty underwhelming, despite talk of how warmer sea water would generate devastating super-storms generating fifty-foot tidal waves and 150 mph winds.  There will be super-storms in the future; there always have been, long before greenhouse gases became an issue and long before human beings even existed.

Every year, it’s “the sky is falling,” until it’s not.  Then, with egg on their faces, the forecasters crawl back into their studios and begin whining about another potential catastrophe, almost as if they’re wishing one would happen.  I am genuinely happy that Idalia did so little damage and that casualties were so low.  I’m not sure the mainstream liberal networks were happy about it. 

As I watched the cone of Hurricane Idalia pass by — the cone just 10 miles from my home — I witnessed the massive disconnect between what the media were reporting and the reality on the ground.  There was some heavy rain and, at the peak in our area, winds of 55 mph — stronger near the center — but the images of reporters standing in the rising waters did not match my experience.  To me, they were silly to be standing out in the wind and rain, and those locations were carefully selected.  There was no flooding in my community despite our proximity to Idalia’s cone. 

I sat comfortably in my house, reading and working, hardly aware that a hurricane was passing by.  We did not lose power, no trees were down, and there was no wind damage.  The reporters were getting wet, the signage around them was bending a bit, and their voices were full of manufactured urgency.  But there was no urgency where I sat.  After a few hours of rain, I got out and drove to get my mail, watching along the way for flooding and broken limbs.  There was none.

If in fact the climate is changing dramatically — past the “boiling point,” as the alarmists like to say — one would expect 2023 to have been a landmark year for storms.  But only one Atlantic storm made landfall, though there is still time for another hurricane to strike the eastern U.S.

The lesson of the 2023 hurricane season is that there has been no dramatic increase in number or intensity of Atlantic hurricanes — and even if there is some increase in the future, coastal residents have become better prepared to deal with it.  Hurricane-resistant housing has been mandatory in Florida since 2004, when a number of major storms struck the state.  Anyone who stayed inside and heeded storm warnings in 2023 was safe.

Storms like Idalia will come and go and be forgotten in days.  What will not be forgotten are the rate hikes that were approved for Florida Power and Light — a base increase of 10.3% beginning in April 2023, with another 10% to cover costs associated with last year’s storms.

In its 178-year history, my Florida hometown has never experienced hurricane-strength winds.  We can deal with hurricanes, but a 20.3% increase in electricity rates in one year is another matter.  Customers were told that much of that increase resulted from higher fuel prices, and those higher fuel prices resulted from Biden’s war on fossil fuels.

Rate increases make it hard for all Americans to cool their homes and protect themselves throughout the year.  According to the CDC, there were 1,714 heat-related deaths in 2022.  Cheaper electricity rates would reduce that number.  More important, each year, there are more than 100,000 cold-related deaths in the U.S. and 19,000 in Canada, according to the New York Post.  Higher heating costs increase the numbers.

Compare that to the number of hurricane-related deaths — a statistic that is buried in search results, presumably because it is an inconvenient truth that hurricanes do not kill very many people.  To the best of my knowledge, there have been only four hurricane-related deaths in the entire eastern U.S. so far in 2023.  It does not make sense to continue restricting oil and gas exploration and drilling when high energy costs are killing vastly more people than climate change.

The summer of 2023 was hot, but I spent part of every morning basking in the Florida sun and enjoyed every minute of it.  Now the mornings have turned cool, and I miss those hot days.  I still spend mornings at the pool, but I have to carry a light jacket.  I’m not getting as much vitamin D as I did in August, and I miss the dopamine and serotonin boost that accompanies it.  The hours of sunshine are dwindling, and there are cold weather and high heating bills ahead.

The long, hot summer is over, and I miss it.

Jeffrey Folks is the author of many books and articles on American culture including Heartland of the Imagination (2011).