Hurricane Irene is bearing down on the Outer Banks of North Carolina as a Category Two storm, and is expected to track a path of destruction up the densely populated Atlantic coast....
Global warming pollution is far from the only reason that Hurricane Irene shouldn’t be thought of as a “natural” disaster. Much of the devastating potential of Hurricane Irene will be a consequence of past decisions about land use, construction and coastal preservation, mitigated by the brave work of public servants under attack by Tea Party conservatives. Even as we have polluted the climate to increase the threat from Atlantic storms, we have overbuilt the increasingly vulnerable coasts. Although Irene is being described as a “once in a lifetime” threat, the weight of the evidence indicates that this storm is merely a harbinger of our dangerous future.
Really, I wish the internet was a one strike and you are out kinda thing. Crap like this is so stupid on so many levels. In fact, it is too dumb to need to be fisked. It's self-fisking.
It's also anti-science. The only people working in the field of hurricanes that believe a global warming signal is detectable in the data are so far out of the mainstream that there is only one word for them: cranks. They are cranks because they will do anything to shoe-horn reality into their preferred personal ideological perspective.
As for Irene being a "once in a lifetime" storm, well, that could indeed be true... if you were a German Shepard that is. For those of us a little bit older, well, we have seen this sort of storm before. Just 15 years ago in fact:
This is Bertha, a storm from July 1996 which pretty closely follows the exact same track and intensity of Irene. If anything, Irene is a little weaker. The only difference between the two storms is the amount of "the world is ending" crapola we have to endure nowadays.
I do miss the saner days of the 90's.
