« Own goal: Biden's bid to discredit Trump with Mar-a-Lago raid has only made Trump more popular —I&I/TIPP poll | Biden tries to speak with a dead congresswoman »
September 28, 2022

Hurricane Ian is breathtakingly, terrifyingly powerful

By Andrea Widburg

The footage from Hurricane Ian’s landfall along Florida’s west coast is staggering. It should remind us how puny we are compared to nature. For the entirety of their time on earth, humans have had to reckon with nature’s incomparable power, whether it comes in the form of hurricanes, earthquakes, volcanoes, droughts, or anything else the earth dishes out to the lifeforms inhabiting it. This post has a collection of just some footage of the storm’s fury, all arranged in roughly chronological order so you can get a sense of the storm’s trajectory. At the end, I’ve also thrown in a couple of posts showing both how foolish and how vindictive leftists are and a Halloween-esque piece of good advice.

Here’s the footage, every bit of which is overwhelming and, to the extent it represents the loss of people’s homes and businesses, tragic:

And then there’s the genius who insists that this hurricane is proof of anthropogenic climate change:

It’s at this point that I always feel compelled to drag out the modern history of hurricanes.

As a general matter, the 18th century, before the Industrial Revolution, was a time of ferocious hurricanes. Part of that is because there really were a lot of serious hurricanes then. The Great Hurricane of 1790 was the worst Atlantic hurricane since we’ve kept records. It killed at least 20,000 people, with estimates as high as 27,500 people. It’s believed that the winds exceeded 200 MPH.

But there’s another reason those hurricanes were so bad: Europeans had begun settling those regions, and they did two things that hadn’t happened before: They greatly increased the population in the path of those hurricanes, and they kept records. Before then, hurricanes went unrecorded.

The worst hurricane in American history was the Great Galveston hurricane in 1900, which killed 8,000 to 12,000 people. While this was during the Industrial Revolution, this was long before CO2 in the atmosphere (which is even now a minuscule proportion of the earth’s atmosphere) had begun to serve as a vehicle for advancing leftist policies.

If you look at this list of other major hurricanes, you’ll quickly realize that the devastation the list describes is primarily economic—and that’s because there are more people living in hurricane zones. That is, the hurricanes aren’t worse; it’s just that more of us experience them.

The above is an example of leftist foolishness. The following is an example of leftist nastiness, which speaks for itself:

Finally, this bit of practical advice got a lot of play on Twitter because of something in the freezer other than bottled water. Apparently, Halloween comes early for some:

Image: Lightening in Hurricane Ian’s eye wall. Twitter screen grab.

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