MOST people, I suspect, believe that hurricanes are becoming both stronger and more frequent thanks to global warming. Hardly surprising, since we are bombarded with media propaganda to this effect.
The BBC often makes such claims. In September, for instance, their monthly Climate Check video, presented as a factual report by weatherman Ben Rich, made this bold assertion: ‘Climate scientists believe that global warming is making [hurricanes] stronger.’
‘Scientists Say’ – the BBC can get away with all sorts of nonsense with this ploy, and there are always one or two junk scientists around to back up such assertions with little or no evidence.
The claim is that warmer oceans provide more energy, which hurricanes feed off. But genuine hurricane experts tell us that things are much more complicated than this. There are factors which may weaken hurricanes in a warming world, for instance wind shear.
In any case, we don’t have to rely on theories and computer models, because we have the actual data. It is only since satellite monitoring began in earnest in the 1980s that we have had comprehensive data. Before that, many mid-ocean hurricanes were not observed or measured, as we were reliant mainly on ships which happened to be in the vicinity. Even hurricane hunter aircraft, which began service in the 1940s, rarely flew far from land in those days, and never into the heart of the most powerful storms.
But we do have good long-term data for hurricanes which make landfall in the US, and this goes back to 1851. As the chart below shows, there is no trend whatsoever in the number of these hurricanes.
Indeed, the busiest season was all the way back in 1886, when a record six hurricanes hit the US, including two major storms with sustained winds of 111mph or more.
Neither is there any evidence that hurricanes are becoming more powerful. The strongest was the infamous Labor Day hurricane in 1935, which recorded sustained winds of 160mph. The second strongest was Camille in 1969, followed by Andrew in 1992.
Global data since 1980 shows that hurricanes around the world are neither growing more frequent or more powerful:
https://climatlas.com/tropical/
As is so often the case, the truth is being kept from the public at large. Instead they are fed lies and misinformation.
Brits dropping like flies in the heat!
For years the climate establishment has been trying to convince us that thousands a year are dying in the UK because of global warming.
We routinely hear claims that summer heatwaves are killing off thousands of us, and that this death toll would soon reach critical levels. In 2018, for instance, the Parliamentary Environmental Audit Committee warned of 7,000 heat-related deaths a year by 2050.
Not to be outdone, the Lancet informed us last year that there were 8,500 heat-related deaths here amongst the over-65s alone in 2018, double the average from 2000 to 2004. Perhaps they need to get a new calculator, because five months later a new study reckoned that only 5,500 had died in three decades!
Jumping on the bandwagon, the Met Office issued its first ever Amber Warning for heat this summer. (Clue – the system for heat warnings was only introduced this year!)
What is mysterious about all of this is that cold kills far more people than heat. This is true not only in the UK, but across the world as well. Unlikely though it may seem, this is even the case in hot countries such as India.
Excess deaths in Britain in winter are so significant that the Office for National Statistics (ONS) publishes a separate report each year about them:
Typically they add up to 25,000 or more each year. You might have thought that if the Lancet was so concerned for our health, they would be welcoming milder winters.
In fact, far from the fiction of deadly heatwaves, the death toll in summer is always by far the lowest of the year. And when we look at summer deaths over the years, we find that the hot summers of 2018 and 2019 recorded a lower percentage of deaths than colder summers, such as the wet summer of 2012:
Office for National Statistics
Given all this, it may come as a surprise to be told that Britain had the world’s deadliest weather disaster last year. Forget about floods, hurricanes and droughts around the world, a few sunny days here in August topped the death list, according to the official disaster database maintained by the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED) in France:
2,556!
The number is eerily exact, isn’t it? But nobody dies with ‘Death due to heat’ written on their death certificate, so where does the number come from?
According to Public Health England, they compared deaths during the heatwave with the seven-day average before and after. But as the number of deaths over the summer as a whole was no higher than other summers, after allowing for Covid, all this means is that people died during the heatwave who would have passed away a few days later anyway. They were not killed by the heat, but died from natural causes.
The idea that people are dropping like flies because of a few days of temperatures in the 80s is absurd, particularly when such temperatures are regarded as normal in many countries.
The Met Office, PHE and the media, who have been perpetuating this scare with the sole intention of terrorising people, should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves.
David Viner Day
David Viner Day arrived early this year, last Saturday to be precise. This day marks the first widespread snowfall of the winter in England.
For those who are not familiar with this, it was David Viner who told us in March 2000: ‘Within a few years winter snowfall will become a very rare and exciting event . . . Children just aren’t going to know what snow is.’
At the time, Viner was a senior research scientist at the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia (subsequently disgraced by the Climategate emails scandal), so you might have thought he knew what he was talking about. As subsequent events have proved, he was talking through his hat!
This was not Viner’s only crackpot prediction. In 2006, he claimed that European tourists would be flocking to Blackpool as resorts on the Med became unbearably hot.
His warnings of doom are up there with so many others from climate scaremongers over the years – disappearing Arctic ice, nations wiped out by rising seas, a new Ice Age in Europe, Mediterranean summers, mega droughts, 200 million climate refugees, and many more. Yet still the gullible media falls for them.
Ed ‘second jobs’ Davey
Sir Ed Davey, leader of the Liberal Democrats, has been at the forefront of attacks recently on Tory MPs who have second jobs. Which is a bit rich because he has been coining it in to the tune of £78,000 a year from second jobs.
The international law firm, Herbert Smith Freehills, pays him £5,000 a month for six hours consultancy work. On top of that, he gets £4,500 every three months from Next Energy Capital for 12 hours work. They are a specialist investment and asset manager in the solar power sector. Purely by coincidence, Davey was Secretary of State for Energy & Climate Change during the Coalition years. During this time, he oversaw a massive increase in subsidies for solar power in the UK.
It is of course Lib Dem policy to double wind and solar power capacity by 2030. Purely a coincidence, no doubt.
