This article originally appeared on heartland.org.
Just two days after a summer freeze cut growing seasons prematurely short in New York and New England, global warming activists marched in New York City against global warming.
Temperatures dropped below freezing Friday in many parts of New York and other Northeastern states, with the freezing summertime temperatures setting many records throughout the Northeast. Global warming activists responded on Sunday by marching in New York City and claiming global warming is baking the planet.
With global temperatures remaining flat for the past 17 years and record summertime cold sending people shivering throughout the Northeast, protest organizer Bill McKibben deemphasized the ???warming??? part of global warming in a New York Daily News article on the eve of the march. Instead, his article, titled ???New York, it???s time to sound the climate change alarm,??? claimed ???climate change??? is responsible for Hurricane Sandy and California wildfires (???a planet that???s now literally on fire???!).
In choosing to make Hurricane Sandy his hurricane poster child for global warming, McKibben didn???t really have much of a choice. Sandy came ashore in New Jersey with winds registering 80 mph ??? barely hurricane strength. McKibben couldn???t choose a major hurricane strike (defined by meteorologists at Category 3 or higher) to pin on global warming because there hasn???t been one since 2005. It has been an unheard of 8 years, 11 months since the last major hurricane hit the United States. We are currently benefiting from the longest stretch in recorded history without a major hurricane strike. The prior record was merely 6 years, 2 months between major hurricanes.
Nor can McKibben and his fellow alarmists claim global warming makes hurricanes more likely to hit heavily populated Northeastern states. While Northeastern hurricane strikes are rare in recent decades, they were much more frequent in past decades before our recent global warming. No major hurricane has struck the Northeast since Hurricane Gloria came ashore on Long Island and then pushed up the Connecticut River Valley in 1985, and Gloria is the only major hurricane to strike the Northeast in the past 50 years. Compare that to the pre-global warming era when hurricanes in the U.S. Northeast were much more frequent. Four major hurricanes ??? Carol, Edna, Connie, and Donna ??? made their way up the East Coast and subsequently barreled into the Northeast between 1953 and 1960, during a period of global cooling. Major hurricanes struck the Northeast in the 1930s and 1940s, also.
We are now benefiting from the longest period in recorded history without a major hurricane strike anywhere in the nation. We are also benefiting from an unprecedented scarcity of major hurricane strikes in the U.S. Northeast. With so little to work with, McKibben takes the sole minor hurricane of any significance during the past nine years and claims it was created by global warming. Well, if you can pin the formation of any minor hurricane ??? no matter how small or infrequent ??? on global warming, then you also have to pin the remarkable recent lack of hurricanes on global warming. And by McKibben???s logic, global warming has prevented seven major hurricane strikes that would otherwise have clobbered the United States during the past nine years.
The rest of this article is accessible here at Forbes.com.
