Weather is inherently mysterious.  Multiple forces, such as wind, clouds, seasonal and day-night cycles, and air pressure are constantly interacting and causing continuous chaos.  In the aftermath of two particularly destructive hurricanes, the fear-mongers are bloviating to the max over the catastrophic effects on the climate caused by human existence. 

And yet there is no discernible trend toward either more storms or more intense hurricanes compiled over more than beyond the last century.  (This chart by NOAA was especially easy to find.)  Thus far, the decade of the 1940s saw the most seriously intense storms.  Being historical data, this brings to mind a modification of Santayana’s famous adage: when people are ignorant of their history, they make it really easy for demagogues to lie to them about it.

Rather than human consumption of fossil fuels, two other factors are mostly relevant when it comes to the damage wrought by hurricanes: the path they take and the development of infrastructure within that path.  Out on the open sea, a hurricane may damage a few ships, but when one goes over a population center...well, you know, it just happened.

What determines the path is largely chaotic.  Go figure.  There’s this weird thing called the jet stream, which is sort of the result of the Earth’s continuous rotation within a tenuous atmospheric envelope.  Becoming known to American aviators during World War 2, the particular details of the jet stream were kept as a military secret well into the mid-twentieth century.  Ocean currents and surface temperatures are also involved.  Early forecasts of hurricane paths are typically all over the map.  As the time frame compresses, they tend to become more accurate, but not always.

Then there’s the “atypically” warm weather that sometimes happens in early autumn.  We just had some of that, along with offshore winds and seriously elevated fire danger.  In the olden days, this was called “Indian summer.”  Back in 1919, Victor Herbert even wrote a song by that name.  Maybe I’m just a cynic, but I’m expecting the fear-mongers to start pandering to the general public’s pervasive ignorance of earth science to cause panic over yet another routine weather event.

There are three scientific disciplines that are especially useful when looking at weather and climate of the distant past: geology; paleontology; and tree ring analysis, known as dendrochronology.  Geology shows us the impact glaciers have had on the Earth’s surface.  Paleontology shows us the now extinct life forms that thrived under previous environmental conditions.  Dendrochronology shows us a preserved record of ancient weather conditions such as year-to-year rainfall and temperature.

How warm would the weather have to be for giant reptiles to flourish all over the Earth?  Pretty warm, it seems.  There is some work afoot to show that dinosaurs may have been warm-blooded.  Good luck with that.  Birds are the first known warm-blooded animals, and they evolved from reptiles and still tend to have scales on their legs.  Mammals are also warm-blooded.  Enormously large mammals such as wooly mammoths were common during the last ice age, the Pleistocene.  Having a large size is especially beneficial for warm-blooded animals in cold climates, since surface area of the outer skin increases much more slowly than the actual body mass, making the large animal significantly more thermally efficient than a smaller one.

But why is the blatant climate change hoax still being promoted?  There are two different reasons.  The first is held among the true believers: humans are evil.  They recklessly continue to damage the Earth’s biosphere, just for trivial benefits and without the slightest concern for the consequences of their actions.  The other is political: fear can be a terrific motivator but is not all that conducive to good decision-making.  That’s fine, too.  The wannabe mega-state tyrants l-o-v-e to deal with fear and poor decision-making.  How else can they effectively enslave the masses so as to fulfill their objectives?

And what are these objectives?  Taking control of everything comes to mind.  The evil players in politics are mostly after control.  The rest of us just want to have the streets swept and the criminals pulled away from the rest of us.  The term Statist should replace Marxist in this dialogue.  Absolute government authority should overcome the self-direction of the individual — since so many among us are not really attuned to proper functionality in the modern world.

Socialism was already in the works when Karl Marx got involved.  I like to say that a communist is an angry socialist.  Marx injected class struggle into the quest for ownership of the means of production.  Thus, the USA was a tough sell for Marxism since we are a particularly socially mobile society.  The late, great Walter E. Williams would often say that the ranks of the one-percenters were constantly changing — since new ones would rise up, while others would blow it and fall away.  The “Old World,” by contrast, is littered with caste systems and other forms of enforced social order.

Back to Caddell’s “elite gentry” — their desires are in mortal conflict with the aspirations of just plain folks.  Or as Lincoln said, “God must love the common man, for he made so many of them.”  To some, populism is a dirty word.  To others, it is a path into the future.  It can mean different things to different people.  I like to use the term personal freedom.  We can do what we want — as long as we don’t interfere with the freedom of others.  But to others, “freedom” is a dirty word.

Image via Public Domain Pictures.