Trump says Florence is just ‘Mother Nature.’ A stunning new climate study says he’s wrong (?)

By Joe Romm

Professional Warmist Joe Romm is easily stunned. I would have said "rubbishy' instead of "stunning". All these attribution studies are  just speculation and assumption.  There is no way you can prove anything either way by them.  It's just modelling and we know how often modelling gets it wrong when it models the future.  The type of modelling below is worse than that.  It does not concern the future so there is nothing to check its conclusions against.  It is unfalsifiable, which shows it is game-play or faith, not science

 Tony Heller comments drily:  "We had more rainfall in Boulder five years ago this week (18 inches) than most of North Carolina is forecast to have from Florence. It must have been due to the high sea surface temperatures in eastern Colorado"

In his tweeted warning about Hurricane Florence Wednesday, President Trump said, “bad things can happen when you’re talking about a storm this size. It’s called Mother Nature.”

The authors of a bombshell new analysis, “The human influence on Hurricane Florence,” disagree. They find that human-caused global warming has supercharged the atmosphere so much that it is boosting the very worst of the projected rainfall totals by more than 50 percent.

ThinkProgress asked coauthor Dr. Michael Wehner of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) whether “your analysis allows us to say the storm is more than just Mother Nature.” He replied in an email:

Indeed. The most important message from this (and previous) analyses is that “Dangerous climate change is here now!” It is not a distant threat in the future but today’s reality. Event attribution has shown this for heat waves, floods, certain kind of droughts and tropical cyclones.

Scientists have been warning for decades that global warming means more intense deluges since there’s more water vapor in the atmosphere and because warmer ocean temperatures are the engine that drives stronger hurricanes. And scientists have now observed that the most extreme rainfall events have been rising rapidly, especially on the East Coast.

In response, scientists have started doing “after-the-fact” analyses of how much climate change has contributed to worsening the rainfall of major storms.

For instance, a December 2017 study (coauthored by Wehner) found that climate change boosted Harvey’s rainfall in the worst hit area by 38 percent. A 2018 study found that “post-1980 warming” boosted Harvey’s total precipitation by 20 percent.

The new study on Florence published Thursday is the first to look at the impact of human-caused climate change on a hurricane before it makes landfall.

Lead by Dr. Kevin Reed of the Climate Extremes Modeling (CEM) Group at Stony Brook University, the researchers found that because of human-caused climate change, “rainfall will be significantly increased by over 50% in the heaviest precipitating parts of the storm.”

Because the analysis was done in real time, before Florence hit, it was not formally peer-reviewed. The state of the art of attribution analysis has been improving rapidly, allowing this kind of quick analysis. But as Dr. Wehner pointed out to ThinkProgress, the main finding of a 50 percent rain increase for Florence in the hardest hit region isn’t that dissimilar to his peer-reviewed paper on Harvey, which found a 38% increase in the hardest hit region.

The chart below compares two forecasts by the scientists. The Standard Forecast (left) uses an ensemble of existing climate models to create an actual forecast of Florence’s rainfall on September 11. The “Modified Forecast” (right) uses a model that has been “modified to remove the estimated climate change signal from the temperature, moisture, and SST fields to represent a world without climate change.”

In the real world, where humans have dramatically changed the climate through emissions of heat trapping carbon pollution, large parts of North Carolina will be hit by 18 or more inches of rain — a devastating deluge.

In a world without climate change, Florence is still a very destructive storm, but the worst hit region is much smaller and these areas would have much less rain.

Note that this study does not attempt to look at how some of the larger scale impacts of climate change on the jet stream are impacting the storm — and are potentially responsible for the storm hitting the coast in the first place.

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Exploiting Mother Nature
   
There was some good news yesterday: Hurricane Florence weakened. The National Weather Service downgraded Florence to a Category 2 storm. Hopefully it will continue to weaken and “underperform” as it hits the Carolina coast. We are praying for all those in the storm’s path.

Sadly, the Left is politicizing everything. It politicized the Boy Scouts. Fast food. The NFL. Even pronouns.

And, as we know, it has been politicizing the weather for years. Florence is no exception. It is already blaming the hurricane on Trump!

But you sense that the Left is hoping for the worst when it comes to Florence. The Washington Post editorial board declared: “Another Hurricane Is About To Batter Our Coast. Trump Is Complicit.”

A note to the “scientists” on the Post’s editorial board: Trump can’t be complicit because climate change is a long process and he’s been in office less than two years.

I checked and only three Category 4 hurricanes have hit the Carolina coasts since the 1950s, well before climate change was on anyone’s radar. The last was Hugo in 1989. If climate change has gotten so much worse, why haven’t there been more?

Here’s the simple truth: There were terrible hurricanes before Donald Trump and there will be terrible hurricanes after Donald Trump.

The Left’s real issue, of course, is that Trump withdrew the United States from the Paris climate accords, which even if fully implemented would have done very little.

But the exploitation doesn’t end there. Left-wing politicians are accusing the administration of not being prepared. That is absurd. President Trump has repeatedly warned people to evacuate. He has signed disaster declarations to speed up the response.

Unfortunately, Florence will likely cause horrendous damage. The Carolina coast has been massively developed in recent decades. And even with thousands of utility workers already headed to the region, there will be places with no power for days.

That does not mean there was a lack of preparation. That is simply the reality of Mother Nature in spite of man’s best efforts. But that won’t stop the Left from trying to turn Florence into “Trump’s Katrina,” just like it did with Hurricane Maria.

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Hurricane Florence Is Not an Omen About Climate Change

In today’s hyper-politicized world of climate science, hardly a thunderstorm passes without somebody invoking the “scientists say” trope to blame it on carbon emissions.

The logic seems to be: If it’s bad, it was caused by carbon emissions, and we are only going to see more and worse. More and worse floods, droughts, tornadoes, and of course, hurricanes.

The problem with this argument is that overall, we are not seeing more floods, droughts, tornadoes, or hurricanes in spite of the steady rise in the small amount of carbon dioxide, and in spite of the mild warming of the planet. The data show that there is no significant upward trend in any of these weather events.

These are not the conclusions of climate skeptics. They are conclusions drawn by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and our own National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

This week, the Carolina coast and some yet-to-be-determined inland counties will endure the heavy and destructive rains of Hurricane Florence. Without a doubt, some places will see records broken.

As the hurricane arrives, talking heads will hit the airwaves claiming that “scientists say” it was caused by carbon emissions. Some may spin it more subtly, saying that while we cannot identify which storms are caused by increased levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, the storms today are getting stronger and more frequent.

But this simply is not true. We are not seeing more frequent hurricanes, nor are we seeing a greater number of major hurricanes.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said as much in its latest science report:

Current data sets indicate no significant observed trends in global tropical cyclone frequency over the past century and it remains uncertain whether any reported long-term increases in tropical cyclone frequency are robust, after accounting for past changes in observing capabilities. … No robust trends in annual numbers of tropical storms, hurricanes, and major hurricanes counts have been identified over the past 100 years in the North Atlantic basin.

Be on the alert for those who quote the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as saying there has been an upward trend in hurricanes since the 1970s. That is a misleading claim. Hurricane landfalls actually fell for the decades before the 1970s.

Cherry-picking endpoints can produce “trends” that are either up or down. The fact is that for the past century, there is no trend.

Furthermore, there was never a time when the climate was stable (as some would claim), when weather events happened with smooth regularity. There have always been cycles—years and decades that included large numbers of hurricanes, and others with few.

Whether carbon dioxide levels rise, fall, or stay the same, we will continue to see hurricanes. Some of these hurricanes will be immensely destructive of both property and human life. Some will break records for wind and/or rain. And they will be tragic.

The fact that tragic weather events have not stopped is not evidence that carbon emissions are leading us to a climate catastrophe. Perhaps we will see a decades-long increase in one category or another, it has happened before—but that will not prove the predictions of catastrophic climate change one way or the other.

Even if all of the mild (though uneven) warming that seems to have occurred over the past century were due to man-made carbon emissions, that would still not be a reason to fear for the future. The overall story does not point to climate catastrophe.

But weather catastrophes will continue to strike, and we will still face the danger wrought by nature’s wrath. Hurricane Florence is shaping up to be exactly such a storm.

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The Stealth Agenda of Climate Cronyism

The issue of climate change is more about influence, money, and power than about science.

Hurricane Florence is currently ravaging the Carolina coast, causing widespread flooding, beach erosion, and destruction due to strong winds. While a storm of this magnitude should certainly receive national media attention, it’s no surprise that this one is being used by climate alarmists as a political weapon. Some are even blaming President Donald Trump for it.

The editorial board of The Washington Post opines, “When it comes to extreme weather, Mr. Trump is complicit. He plays down humans’ role in increasing the risks, and he continues to dismantle efforts to address those risks.”

But there’s no need to worry about climate change any longer. California Gov. Jerry Brown and a host of politicians and entertainers are firing up their private jets and gathering for a global climate conference to reduce greenhouse gases and reach “carbon neutrality” by the middle of the 21st century.

Joining the conference will be musician Dave Matthews, actor Alec Baldwin, and Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson. Former Secretary of State John Kerry and former Vice President Al Gore, who predicted the earth would turn into a “total frying pan” by 2016, will round out the climate cabal.

You may notice that none of the people listed above hold any degrees or certifications in meteorology or climatology. In fact, a typical backyard weather watcher is likely more in tune with the climate than Matthews or Baldwin. Those who do study weather and climate know better, and the facts speak for themselves.

Hurricanes have been significantly less frequent in the past 50 years than they were in the first half of the 20th century. Florence is a formidable storm, but it’s not as strong as Gloria in 1985, despite the fact that Florence is over warmer water, according to WeatherBELL Analytics meteorologist Joe Bastardi who predicted back in July that this hurricane season might feature more intense hurricanes.

And here are some questions that certainly won’t be asked at Gov. Brown’s climate conference: Why were there such powerful hurricanes long before man was supposedly dumping carbon into the atmosphere? Why are storms generally less extreme than they were decades ago? What about the recent decade without a single hurricane making landfall in the U.S.? And what are the real driving forces behind storms that climate change activists knowingly fail to discuss?

The reality, of course, is that the climate change industry is heavy on politics and light on science. Strongly critical of Big Oil and its influence on Capitol Hill, the climate lobby is just as influential.

Fortunately, climate alarmists have been largely unsuccessful in getting major climate change legislation passed at the national level. For this, we can thank the Trump administration, which doesn’t buy into their exaggerations of rising sea levels and monster storms fueled by industry. So, unable to convince the public to support their radical legislation, those who warn of anthropogenic climate change have resorted to subverting our democratic system.

A paper written by Christopher C. Horner and published by the Competitive Enterprise Institute “details an extensive and elaborate campaign using elective law enforcement offices, in coordination with major donors and activist pressure groups, to attain a policy agenda that failed through the democratic process.”

Horner adds that the scheme, funded by former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, “uses nonprofit organizations as pass-through entities by which donors can support elected officials to, in turn, use their offices to advance a specific set of policies favored by said donors.”

Thus, having failed to make their case in the marketplace of ideas, the alarmists are embracing climate cronyism at its worst.

Clearly, the more one looks at the issue of climate change, the more one sees that it’s really all about influence, money, and power. Silencing those with opposing views on climate science, brainwashing the public on the dangers of global warming, and characterizing recurring weather events as never-before-seen examples of man’s impact on the environment, the climate change lobby will do anything to force the U.S. and the world to adopt an agenda that threatens our sovereignty, prosperity, and Liberty.

In a few days, Hurricane Florence will have passed. We pray that the Carolinas are spared the worst. Yet no matter what happens, climate change extremists will use Florence (and every other useful weather event) to push their lies instead of advancing our understanding of science for the greater good. And they’re resorting to any means necessary to make sure you’re left out of the discussion.

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Blaming bad weather/hurricanes on Trump and/or ‘global warming’ is a throwback to medieval witchcraft

Book Excerpt from "The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change"

As climate activists and the news media exploit Hurricane Florence in their attempts to scare the public and blame President Trump, a new book details the long history of using superstition to blame bad weather events on witchcraft and other unscientific factors.

Once, long before the modern SUV was the culprit, witches were blamed for causing bad weather and crop failures. Sallie Baliunas, formerly of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, has explained how the severe conditions of the medieval Little Ice Age in the Middle Ages created a perfect atmosphere for witchcraft trials. “Those severe conditions in climate brought about crop failure, starvation, disease, death and social unrest,” Baliunas noted.

“They said, for a hundred years such a storm has not been seen. The storm was deemed so unusual in this period of superstition that it had to be unnatural, it had to be supernatural.” Baliunas continued with the parallel. “Legal philosopher John Boden in 1580 noted that witchcraft was the most terrible problem facing humankind. Again a very, a very modern note.”

Baliunas drew other links between witchcraft hysteria and today’s climate debate as well. “Now, there were skeptics who stood up but they were often accused of, or threatened to be accused of, sorcery as to squash any debate,” she noted. “Any feeble notes of humane skeptics had to be wrenched out of society.”

Something very similar is happening today, as Canadian physicist Denis Rancourt testifies from his experience. “When I tell environmental activists that global warming itself is not something to be concerned about—environmental activists attack me,” Rancourt explains. “They shun me, and they do not allow me to have my materials published in their various magazines and so on.”

The belief that witches could alter the weather was so pervasive in the Middle Ages that even religious leaders believed it. In 1484 Pope Innocent VIII wrote, “Therefore it is reasonable to conclude that, just as easily as they [witches] raise hailstorms, so can they cause lightning and storms at sea; and so no doubt at all remains on these points.”

In our modern era, the Associated Press echoes the medieval pope’s warning about witches and bad weather, but this time blames man-made global warming. “From smoke-choked Moscow to water-soaked Iowa and the High Arctic, the planet seems to be having a midsummer breakdown. It’s not just a portent of things to come, scientists say, but a sign of troubling climate change already under way,” the AP intoned ominously in an August 12, 2010 article.

Scholarly studies confirm that witch trials were on the upswing during the Little Ice Age. According to a 2012 Live Science article, “Historical records indicate that, worldwide, witch hunts occur more often during cold periods, possibly because people look for scapegoats to blame for crop failures and general economic hardship.

Fitting the pattern, scholars argue that cold weather may have spurred the infamous Salem witch trials in 1692.” Emily Oster studied witchcraft and temperatures for her senior thesis at Harvard University and found that the Little Ice Age coincided with the most active era of witchcraft trials in Europe. Lower temperatures correlated with higher numbers of witchcraft accusations. She published her witchcraft research in the Journal of Economic Perspectives in 2004. Oster explained that “popes and scholars alike clearly believed witches were capable of controlling the weather, and therefore, crippling food production.”

Salem State University historian Emerson Baker’s research agrees with Oster’s findings. “A harsh New England winter really may have set the stage for accusations of witchcraft,” noted a Live Science analysis of Baker’s research. The bad weather may have helped stir up the population’s psychological state into a full blown mass hysteria. “The young girls who accused their fellow townsfolk of witchcraft are believed to have been suffering from a strange psychological condition known as mass hysteria, Live Science noted.”

Princeton Professor Emeritus of Physics William Happer in 2017 drew parallels to today’s man-made climate change claims. “I don’t see a whole lot of difference between the consensus on climate change and the consensus on witches. At the witch trials in Salem the judges were educated at Harvard. This was supposedly 100 per cent science. The one or two people who said there were no witches were immediately hung. Not much has changed,” Happer quipped.

A 2014 Scientific American analysis found “in Medieval Europe the idea of a sort of demonic conspiracy, perpetrated by sorcerers and witches against society, became common lore.” “These difficult times also see the emergence of a new kind of superstition, that witches could ‘make weather’ and steal the milk from the (starving) cows,” the analysis added.

According to Scientific American, Bavarian and Swiss accounts of the era reported: “1445, in this year was a very strong hail and wind, as never seen before, and it did great damage, […] and so many women, which it’s said to have made the hail and the wind, were burned according to the law.”

“Anno 1626 the 27th of May, all the vineyards were totally destroyed by frost […], the same with the precious grain which had already flourished.[…] Everything froze, [something] which had not happened as long as one could remember, causing a big rise in price.[…] As a result, pleading and begging began among the peasants, [who] questioned why the authorities continued to tolerate the witches and sorcerers destruction of the crops. Thus the prince-bishop punished these crimes, and the persecution began in this year…”

Literal witch hunts are not a thing of the past. “Weather patterns continue to trigger witchcraft accusations in many parts of Africa, where witch killings persist. According to a 2003 analysis by the Berkeley economist Edward Miguel, extreme rainfall—either too much or too little—coincides with a significant increase in the number of witch killings in Tanzania,” reported a 2012 analysis in Live Science.

Climate skeptic Tony Heller of Real Climate Science has pointed out parallels between Aztec sacrifices to stop bad weather and the modern global warming movement’s efforts to appease the CO2 gods. In 1450, Aztec priests encouraged people to sacrifice blood to the gods to end the severe drought that was decimating corn crops. They ended up sacrificing thousands of people in a few weeks.

Heller quipped, “Like the Aztecs, many scientists believe that sacrificial offerings are necessary to stabilize climate. But there are some key differences.  1. Aztecs correctly believed that the climate was controlled by the moods of the Sun. Modern climate scientists have not progressed that far yet. 2. Aztec priests believed that only a small percentage of the population needed to be sacrificed, whereas the modern priests believe that everyone (except for themselves) needs to sacrifice.”

Aborigines in nineteenth-century Australia blamed the bad climate on the arrival of the White man. A March 11, 1846 article in the Maitland Mercury explained that “great changes have taken place in the climate of Australia,” citing “heavy rains” and “deluging floods” and noted, “The aborigines say that the climate has undergone this change since the white-man came in country.”

In 2013, the White man was once again being blamed for climate change. Climate activist Bill McKibben lamented, “White America has fallen short”—by voting for “climate deniers.” In a March 14, 2013 Los Angeles Times op-ed, McKibben complained, “Election after election, native-born and long-standing citizens pull the lever for climate deniers.”

The history of mankind is one of superstition and fear of the weather gods. It is a history of ritualistic appeasements in attempts to prevent bad weather. “Naked Girls Plow Fields for Rain,” blared the headline of a July 24, 2009, Reuters report. “Farmers in an eastern Indian state have asked their unmarried daughters to plow parched fields naked in a bid to embarrass the weather gods to bring some badly needed monsoon rain, officials said on Thursday.”

A 2009 article in AllAfrica.com reported, “The Karimojong [in Uganda] blame the spell of calamities like drought and disease to the “angry gods.” As the report explained, “Little do they know that their area is suffering the consequences of a larger problem, climate change.”

As University of London professor emeritus Philip Stott pointed out, “From the Babylon of Gilgamesh to the post-Eden of Noah, every age has viewed climate change cataclysmically, as retribution for human greed and sinfulness.” Stott explained, “Extreme weather events are ever present, and there is no evidence of systematic increases. . . . Global warming represents the latest doom-laden ‘crisis,’ one demanding sacrifice to Gaia for our wicked fossil-fuel-driven ways. But neither history nor science bolsters such an apocalyptic faith.”

Extreme weather expert Roger Pielke Jr. of the University of Colorado wrote of the mystical qualities of the climate change claims in an analysis titled “It has been foretold.” “Because various unsupportable and just wrong claims are being advanced by leading scientists and scientific organizations, it would be easy to get the impression that on the issues of extreme events and climate change, IPCC science has a status similar to interpretations of Nostradamus and the Mayan calenders.”

Scientist Doug Hoffman mocked the climate change establishment. “The whole enterprise is reminiscent of Medieval mystics claiming to predict the future while spouting gibberish,” Hoffman, a mathematician and engineer who worked on environmental models and conducted research in molecular dynamics simulations, Hoffman wrote on October 13, 2009. “Palm readers and fortune tellers stand as good a chance as any in this game.”

Today’s global warming narrative blames every bad weather event on man-caused global warming. As we have seen, there is no way to falsify these “climate change” claims because bad weather events are always going to happen—and every bad weather event “proves” their case. Have we really advanced since the days of the medieval witch hunt?

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