Media members of the Cult of Climastrology are cute, in a deranged, cultish kind of way. First up, the HuffPost’s Lydia O’Conner
Texans Brace For ‘Life-Threatening’ Hurricane Harvey To Hit Friday
A large swath of Texas began bracing for intense rainfall and flooding as Hurricane Harvey neared its coast Thursday.
Harvey could be the first hurricane ranked as Category 3 or stronger (sustained winds of at least 111 mph) to make landfall in the U.S. since 2005. It is expected to hit late Friday or early Saturday. Nearly the entire Texas Gulf Coast, from Port Mansfield to Sargent, is under a hurricane warning. If it makes landfall, it will be the strongest hurricane to hit the Texas coastal bend in 47 years, according to The Weather Channel.
The National Hurricane Center announced Thursday afternoon that Harvey was “rapidly intensifying†and became a hurricane after initially being categorized as a tropical storm. It strengthened even further overnight, growing into a Category 2 storm with winds of 105 mph, the National Hurricane Center said.
It’s actually a good article, right up to
Climate scientists have long warned that hurricanes will become stronger and more frequent as human activity drives up global temperatures. Already, Harvey is emerging as potentially historically significant.
Is it worth the effort, once again, to highlight just what those prognostications were and how they utterly failed? Even the UN IPCC refuses to link/connect hurricanes to anthropogenic climate change.
Then we have Brendan Gibbons at San Antonio Express-News
Harvey’s intensity and rainfall potential tied to global warming
Global warming is making the oceans hotter, fueling the intensity and flooding potential of storms like Harvey, climate scientists said as the hurricane approached.
Driven by higher-than-average temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico, Harvey quickly intensified Thursday and is likely to reach Category 3 hurricane status before it hits the Texas Coast. (snip)
As the Earth’s climate warms because of human burning of fossil fuels, scientists have seen tropical cyclones become more intense and predict they will continue doing so.
Except, the actual evidence of such is sketchy, anecdotal, and just talking points
Since the 1980s when high-quality satellite observations became available, scientists have seen an increase in the “intensity, frequency, and duration†of Atlantic hurricanes, along with the number of Category 4 and 5 storms, according to the 2014 National Climate Assessment.
Well, yes, because the satellites see more. Prior, you couldn’t know about all the storms unless ships recognized them or they came ashore. Can they, with high certainty, say hurricane activity is any different from, say, 1900, or back during the Little Ice Age? But, wait, what’s this?
What scientists can’t say for sure is whether hurricanes and tropical storms are happening more frequently.
Unlike some other extreme weather events like heat waves, blizzards and rainstorms, hurricanes are relatively rare. In Texas, two named storms make landfall every three years, on average, Nielsen-Gammon said. For Category 3 storms and above, the average rate is one per decade, he said.
In other words, those two paragraphs contradict the rest of Brendan’s missive. Because he did write that they were happening more frequently. Multiple times. And, despite the averages, Texas hasn’t seen a hurricane since Ike in 2008, and last saw a major hurricane was Rita in September 2005.
There are plenty more of climate nutters out there, and you can expect the list to grow and become more hysterical, but, let’s look at something else in the HuffPost article, which is repeated all over the place
Corpus Christi Mayor Joe McComb said at a news conference Thursday that the city is “almost at the threshold for mandatory evacuation†and urged residents to make arrangements now.
“I’m not going to risk our police and fire people going to try and drag somebody out of the house if they don’t want to go,†McComb said. “Because our fire and police, they’re fathers and mothers, brothers, sisters, uncles. They’ve got relatives and they’ve got family, and we don’t want to put them in harm’s way because someone just wanted to stay.â€
Harvey, like all tropical systems, is not too be messed with, and due to the forecast that it will hang around, will be beyond dangerous. There are always those people who do not take it seriously, then have to be rescued, putting fire and police, and military, at risk. Those same people often then whine about it taking so long and such. If they put themselves in harm’s way, yes, this is on them.
Crossed at Right Wing News.
