You could see it coming even before Hurricane Ian slammed into Florida’s west coast: Democrats would blame climate change for the storm.
The claim was spread by Democrats in Florida’s two biggest elections this fall.
Appearing on MSNBC on Wednesday, Democratic Rep. Val Demings, who is challenging Sen. Marco Rubio, noted, “We are not going to be where we need to be until we acknowledge climate change and take it extremely seriously.”
“Look, how much more do we need to experience before we accept hurricanes are becoming more intense, more severe? We have several tornado watches going on right here in Florida. We see extreme flooding in particular in south Florida with the rise of the sea level. It’s time to stop talking about it. We all need to come to the table and realize that climate change is real.”
Democrat Charlie Crist, Gov. Ron DeSantis’ opponent, added his own climate change claim.
Also on MSNBC on Thursday, Crist told his host, “You listed earlier in your broadcast the five major storms that are hitting the United States. Three of the five have hit Florida. So one factor in all of this is climate change. These storms are getting bigger, they’re getting stronger, and they’re affecting that many more lives as a result of it.”
“It is remarkable what we are witnessing, and as we get through this, hopefully, we’ll have an opportunity to make sure that we do things so we can address going forward to try to reduce the size of these massive storms that Florida has suffered from so brutally. And so that will be a focus as we’re moving forward.”
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The narrative from Democrats with a storm is as predictable as the sun rising in the east. The problem, though, is the evidence is scant for their position.
One of the first people to rebut such claims was a member of the Biden administration.
Before Ian came ashore, CNN’s Don Lemon was trying to get the nation’s top hurricane authority to blame the storm on climate change.
“I don’t think you can link climate change to any one event,” Jamie Rhome, head of the National Hurricane Center, told Lemon. “On the whole, on the cumulative, climate change may be making storms worse. But to link it to any one event, I would caution against that.”
On Thursday, Dr. Roy Spencer, who unlike Demings and Crist is an actual climatologist, noted that there is no discernible pattern in hurricane frequency globally or in the strength of storms hitting Florida.
“If global warming is causing a change in tropical cyclone activity, it should show up in global statistics,” Spencer wrote. “The latest peer-reviewed study (published in March) of the accumulated wind energy in tropical cyclones since 1990 (when we started to have sufficient global data) showed a decrease in hurricane activity. There was an increase in Atlantic activity, but this was matched by an even larger decrease in Pacific activity, due to a shift from El Nino to La Nina conditions during that time.”
“So, yes, there is climate change involved in the uptick in Atlantic activity in recent decades. But it’s natural.”
Spencer argued if we have seen an upswing in hurricane activity over the past 40 years, it is because of satellite technology. In other words, we’re far better at monitoring the weather today than we could before 1980.
Spencer also pointed out that over the last 120 years, the data show “no statistically significant trends in either intensity or frequency of landfalling major hurricanes in Florida.”
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Spencer pointed out that Florida was rocked by four storms with winds above 120 mph between 1919 and 1935 — the same number that have hit Florida, including Ian, since 1992.
What the climate activists also have failed to mention is that before Ian, climate scientists were commenting that the 2022 hurricane season was unusually quiet, relative to projections and recent history.
In addition, they also fail to point out that Florida went 11 years – 2006 to 2016 – without being hit by any storms.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of The Free Press.
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