By Rich Lowry
Saturday, October 12, 2024
The press is in the midst of a panic about hurricane
misinformation.
According to a New York Times headline, “Bizarre Falsehoods About
Hurricanes Helene and Milton Disrupt Recovery Efforts.”
“Officials have said this week,” the paper reports, “that
the disinformation about Hurricanes Helene and Milton was making relief workers
a target, and the American Red Cross warned
that the outlandish claims could prevent survivors from seeking help.”
The article then fails to cite a single example of
someone assaulting relief workers or refusing assistance to justify its premise
or headline.
Of course, what Marjorie Taylor Greene — who believes
sinister actors are manipulating the weather — and others are peddling is rank
nonsense that should be rebutted, whether it’s causing real-world consequences
or not.
Greene and her ilk aren’t the only source of hurricane
disinformation, though.
If we care about accuracy, which we should, and if we
worry about unfounded fears influencing real-world outcomes — again, we should
— then there’s much more influential false and misleading information being
spread about the connection between the frequency and intensity of hurricanes
and changes
in the climate.
The idea that there is a direct, established link between
warming and any given storm is prevalent at the top of our government and in
our elite media. This notion is being used not merely to entertain and fool
people who get their information from anonymous accounts on X but to try to
reorient the American economy by government edict.
This narrative has more credibility than MTG’s nuttery,
since there are scientists and researchers who are willing to push it, but it
is still insidious and wrong.
Surveying damage from Hurricane Helene, President Biden said the other day, “Storms are getting stronger and
stronger.”
“Nobody can deny the impact of the climate crisis
anymore,” he added. “They must be brain-dead if they do.”
The media have, of course, been piling on. A piece in The
Hill had this lede: “Climate change is making hurricanes like Hurricane
Helene more intense, scientific research shows.”
The fascist-obsessive Substacker and Yale professor Timothy
Synder pronounced,
As the earth heats and the storms
and droughts become worse and worse, Trump and Vance will suppress the science
and blame the scientists. The plan to fire all the meteorologists is already
there. Project 2025 will eliminate the National Weather Service and
make climate change a taboo subject inside the federal government.
This direct courting of death is itself quite fascist.
There’s the narrative, then there are the facts.
Last year, Roger Pielke, the influential writer on
scientific affairs, and the meteorologist Ryan Maue wrote, “In 2022 there were
18 total landfalling tropical cyclones of at least hurricane strength around
the world, of which 5 were major hurricanes. Since 1970 the median values are
16 total hurricanes, with 5 of major hurricane strength. So 2022 was very close
to the median of the past half century.”
They noted that, at the time they were writing, the last
two years had seen nearly the least activity over the last 40 years or so.
They noted there’s been no trend in so-called accumulated
cyclone energy globally since 1980.
The theory is that warmer oceans will, eventually, mean
somewhat more intense hurricanes. Even if the climate models are correct,
though, we are talking about small changes over a long period of time.
“One big reason for this,” Pielke and Maue explained, “is
that tropical cyclones have a lot of variability in interannual and
interdecadal time scales and projected changes in storm behavior are relatively
much smaller. A common error in media coverage of hurricanes is to suggest that
small trends possibly detectable later this century can be observed in the
behavior of individual storms today.”
There are all manner of reputable authorities that the
press could cite to avoid its hysteria.
The latest Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change
assessment of cyclones said “there is still no consensus on
the relative magnitude of human and natural influences on past changes in
Atlantic hurricane activity,” that it is uncertain whether past changes “are
outside the range of natural variability.”
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration found:
“In summary, it is premature to conclude with high confidence that increasing
atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations from human activities have had a
detectable impact on Atlantic basin hurricane activity, although increasing
greenhouse gases are strongly linked to global warming.”
“Human activities,” it continued, “may have already
caused other changes in tropical cyclone activity that are not yet detectable
due to the small magnitude of these changes compared to estimated natural
variability, or due to observational limitations.”
The EPA oted in 2021:
Since 1878, about six to seven
hurricanes have formed in the North Atlantic every year. Roughly two per year
make landfall in the United States. The total number of hurricanes
(particularly after being adjusted for improvements in observation methods) and
the number reaching the United States do not indicate a clear overall trend
since 1878.
The press apparently doesn’t understand the difference
between “not yet detectable” and “the obvious force making every powerful storm
worse.”
The New York Times just ran a piece headlined, “Global Warming Made Helene
More Menacing, Researchers Say.” It is based on the work of two dozen
researchers affiliated with an agenda-driven group called World Weather
Attribution. None of the official assessments above are mentioned. Same with a CNN story pegged to the work of the same outfit that ran
under the headline, “Helene was supercharged by ultra-warm water made up to 500
times more likely by global warming, study finds.”
As it happens, the New York Times article on
hurricane misinformation itself traffics in unsupported claims:
The increasing frequency and
devastating power of major storms, heat waves, wildfires and other
weather-related catastrophes tend to elicit an especially strong emotional
response, allowing climate denialists, lobbyists for the oil and gas industry
and rumormongers to exploit people’s concern and confusion.
It’s actually the opposite. The advocates who insist on a
readily discernible connection between climate change and destructive storms
know it’s the most emotive argument they can muster, so all nuances and
inconvenient facts are cast aside.
In other words, it’s not misinformation as such that’s
the problem. What matters is who is misinforming whom, and in behalf of what
cause.
No comments:
Post a Comment