Junk Scientists Try to Weaponize Hurricane Harvey. Again

Man-made climate change is making hurricanes worse, says a study published by the American Geophysical Union, and enthusiastically endorsed by the Washington Post.

According to WaPo:

It is still a matter of debate whether climate change will increase the number of hurricanes, but it is more and more clear that human-caused heating of the planet will boost their severity.

This is absolute rubbish. “Junk scientists weaponizing weather”, as the great Paul Homewood puts it. But perhaps we could have guessed this, given that the paper’s lead author is none other than Kevin “Travesty” Trenberth.

Trenberth, a mustachioed alarmist and IPCC lead author who works at the Climate Analysis Section at the US National Center for Atmospheric Research, is powerfully invested in the great climate change scare story.

In 2009 he sent the infamous email – exposed during Climategate – lamenting the fact that global temperatures weren’t playing in accordance with the alarmists’ computer models:

The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.

More disturbingly, in 2005 as an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Lead Author, he misrepresented the views of one of his contributing expert authors, Chris Landsea, in order to ramp up the scare story.

Landsea, a hurricane expert, had said that recent hurricane activity had not been made more severe by “global warming.”

Trenberth, not a hurricane expert, overruled Landsea and held a press conference declaring the opposite. As a result, Landsea resigned from the IPCC. (For more details, see my previous article here)

Such outrageous behavior, well documented, in the public domain, ought to have been enough to kill Trenberth’s credibility in the eyes of any responsible media organization.

At the least, it ought to raise warning flags about the credibility of a paper lead-authored by a guy with a track record of misrepresenting the facts on this very topic.

In fact, as meteorologist Joe Bastardi demonstrated in the Patriot Post last year, there was nothing particularly abnormal about Harvey – the hurricane on which Trenberth’s scaremongering paper is based.

There is much being made of Harvey and climate change. Meteorologically, as far as the intensity of the storm, let’s see where it ranks among landfalling Category 4 or 5 storms.

It’s tied for 14th.

Bastardi went on:

So if the 1935 Labor Day hurricane — the most powerful storm to be recorded hitting the U.S.; a storm that went from a tropical storm to a Cat. 5 in 36 hours — occurs again, why would it be climate change now but not then?

If the 1938 storm — a storm that took down two billion board feet of trees in New England, caused major river floods in western New England, flooded Providence with 13 feet of water in a storm surge, and had a wind gust of 186 m.p.h. at Blue Hill — occurs again, why would it be climate change now but not then?

If Donna of 1960 showed up again — with hurricane force winds in every state from Florida to Maine, never recorded before or since in U.S. history — why would it be climate change now but not then?

I can go on and on with countless storms.

The answer: It is nature doing what nature does.

Why then, you might not unreasonably ask, is the American Geophysical Union publishing this junk? And why is the Washington Post singling it out for support with an editorial?

Simple. Because that is how the Climate Industrial Complex rolls. The alarmist scientists and the legacy media are in bed with one another because both are ideologically and emotionally committed to promoting the scare.

This is propaganda, straight out of the Tom Steyer playbook, as revealed during the 2016 Podesta hack.

It also proposed the creation of an “extreme weather SWAT team” that would immediately seize on natural disasters and other extreme weather events to advance a political and communications agenda.

Read more at Breitbart