Even before the streets were dry in Houston after Harvey’s devastation, envirochondriacs in the leftist media were harping about how this is just more confirmation that global warming (aka ‘climate change’) is real.
Now comes the Washington Post with this winner of a story: we should stop calling hurricanes ‘natural disasters’ because, due to man-made global warming, there’s nothing natural about them.
There’s very little in the world of politics so nakedly false as the argument that ignores its own facts.
Global temperature models are demonstrating almost on a quarterly basis now either very little or no increase or that previous models were manipulated.
And let’s just ignore all that new ice forming hither and yon. If ignorance is bliss, willful ignorance must be euphoria for liberals.
Here’s more from PJ Media…
Kerry Emanuel at the Washington Post thinks we need to stop referring to hurricanes as “natural disasters.” Why is that? No, he’s not claiming there’s a Bond villain with a hurricane ray menacing the American South.
Nope, nothing like that, but he still thinks we shouldn’t call these storms “natural”:
As the United States struggles to recover from two back-to-back hurricanes, it would be wise to reflect on why we keep having such calamities and whether they are likely to get worse.
We must first recognize the phrase “natural disaster” for what it is: a sham we hide behind to avoid our own culpability. Hurricanes, floods, earthquakes and wildfires are part of nature, and the natural world has long ago adapted to them. Disasters occur when we move to risky places and build inadequate infrastructure.
In the United States, we have in place a range of policies that all but guarantees a worsening string of Katrinas, Sandys, Harveys and Irmas as far as we can see into the future. Climate change acts as a threat-multiplier to these policy-generated disasters, making them progressively worse than they would have been in a stable climate.
[…]
To make matters worse, climate change is increasing the probabilities of hurricane disasters in many places. Rising sea levels worsen storm surges, often the most deadly and destructive aspects of hurricanes. Sandy would probably not have flooded Lower Manhattan had it occurred 100 years earlier, when sea levels were about a foot lower in New York.
My own work demonstrates that the physical cap on hurricane wind speeds rises in a warming climate, permitting more intense storms like Irma to develop, and observations show that this cap is indeed rising. Basic physics tells us that hurricanes produce more rain in a warmer climate. Computer simulations confirm that the incidence of intense, destructive storms rises and that hurricane flooding from rain and storm surges gets worse in warmer climates, though the frequency of weaker storms may actually decline.
