The Media’s Rank Dishonesty About ‘Climate Change’ And Hurricane Ian

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    by Jerome Corsi, American Thinker:

    As Hurricane Ian hit Florida, Michael Mann of the infamous “hockey stick” global warming graph, and Susan Joy Hassol, publisher of Climate Communication’s “Quick Facts,” which are devoted to explaining extreme weather events as anthropogenic catastrophes, rushed an op-ed piece into print. Their opinion piece, published in The Guardian and predictably entitled, “Hurricane Ian Is No Anomaly,” blamed global warming. Mann and Hassol editorialized:

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    Climate change once seemed a distant threat. No more. We now know its face, and all too well. We see it in every hurricane, torrential rainstorm, flood, heatwave, wildfire, and drought. It’s even detectable in our daily weather. Climate disruption has changed the background conditions in which all weather occurs: the oceans and air are warmer, there’s more water vapor in the atmosphere and sea levels are higher. Hurricane Ian is the latest example.

    Mann and Hassol argued that “the storms of the past five years—Harvey, Maria, Florence, Michael, Ida, and Ian—aren’t natural disasters as much as human-made disasters whose amplified ferocity is fueled by the continued burning of fossil fuels and the increase in heat-trapping carbon pollution, a planet-warming ‘greenhouse gas.’”

    As Green New Deal Neo-Marxist dogma, the Mann-Hassol argument is ideologically compelling. Yet the historical record of hurricanes hitting Florida does not establish that Earth is experiencing a unique “pattern of stronger hurricanes, typhoons, and superstorms” because CO2 emitted by burning hydrocarbon fuels since the Industrial Revolution has caused “the oceans to set record levels of warmth.”

    Michael Shellenberger, author of Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All, has documented that the mainstream media reliably jumped on Hurricane Ian to play their role as the climate hysterics’ echo chamber. The Financial Times, New York Times, Washington Post, and ABC News all ran stories claiming hurricane frequency is on the rise, and that climate change is rapidly fueling super hurricanes.

    Shellenberger insists that all such claims are false. “The increasing cost of hurricane damage can be explained entirely by more people and more property in harm’s way,” he wrote in a blog piece entitled, “Media Lying About Climate and Hurricanes,” published on his website. “Consider how much more developed Miami Beach is today compared to a century ago. Once you adjust for rising wealth, there is no trend of increased damage.” Shellenberger also charges that both the Financial Times and the New York Times misrepresented data from the U.S. government’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), purporting to show rising hurricane frequency in landfalls hitting the United States.

    Image: Hurricane Ian. Twitter screen grab.

    The NOAA webpage that these outlets cite—and that Shellenberger argues they misrepresent—is titled “Global Warming and Hurricanes: An Overview of Current Research Results.” The author is Thom Knutson, a senior scientist at NOAA and at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL), last revised the article on October 3, 2022.

    In his article, Knutson correctly notes that the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has repeatedly predicted global warming will cause increased hurricane activity because hurricanes generally form over relatively warm sea surfaces. Thus, he writes, IPCC scientists have used statistical analyses and mathematical models to find a correlation between sea surface temperatures in the Atlantic Ocean (SSTs) and the Power Dissipation Index (PDI). The latter is “an aggregate measure of Atlantic hurricane activity, combining frequency, intensity, and duration of hurricanes.”

    NOAA’s data found that “Atlantic SSTs and PDI have risen sharply since the 1970s, and there is some evidence that PDI levels in recent years are higher than in the previous active Atlantic hurricane era in the 1950s and 60s.” But the key to the NOAA analysis is the following:

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