John Stossel, as a veteran of the “how your carpet will kill you!” sensationalist media game, sees through much of the nonsense surrounding the global warming debate.
Global average temperature has been flat for a decade. But frightening myths about global warming continue.
We’re told there are more hurricanes now. We’re told that hurricanes are stronger. But the National Hurricane Center says it isn’t so.
Meteorologist Maria Molina told me it’s not surprising that climatologists assumed hurricanes would get worse. “Hurricanes need warm ocean waters,” but it turns out that “hurricanes are a lot more complicated than just warm ocean waters.”
Computer models have long predicted nasty effects from our production of greenhouse gasses. But the nasty effects have not appeared. As far as hurricanes, more hit the United States in the 1880s than recently.
Why do people believe that global warming has already created bigger storms? Because when “experts” repeatedly tell us that global warming will wreck the Earth, we start to fit each bad storm into the disaster narrative that’s already in our heads.
Also, attention-seeking media wail about increased property damage from hurricanes. And it’s true! Costs have grown! But that’s because more people build on coastlines, not because storms are stronger or more frequent.
Also, thanks to modern media and camera phones, we hear more about storms, and see the damage. People think Hurricane Katrina, which killed 1,800 people, was the deadliest storm ever. But the 1900 Galveston hurricane killed 10,000 people. We just didn’t have so much media then.
Climatologist Patrick Michaels, director of the Center for the Study of Science at the Cato Institute, says humans don’t have as much impact on global temperature as the doomsayers feared.
“Forecasts of global warming — particularly in the last two years — have begun to come down,” he says. “We’re seeing the so-called ‘sensitivity’ of temperature being reduced by 40 percent in the new climate models. It means we’re going to live.”
Michaels is tired of dire predictions. “I have lived through nine end-of-the-world environmental apocalypses, beginning with (the 1962 environmental book) ‘Silent Spring,’ and, you know, we’re still here.”
