The National Weather Service still prints its bulletins in capital letters. Whether they’re trying to inspire urgency or hearken back to the days when anxious local officials would tear their messages off teleprinters, I do not know, but for yesterday’s hurricane warning in Florida, it was hardly necessary. “FAILURE TO ADEQUATELY SHELTER MAY RESULT IN SERIOUS INJURY, LOSS OF LIFE, OR IMMENSE HUMAN SUFFERING.” That speaks loudly enough in lowercase.
Hurricane Matthew is right now scraping the east coast of Florida, with buffeting winds causing rampant power outages, and already that smallest levy in American life has been washed away, the one separating climate science from punditry. Progressives almost immediately fingered man-made global warming as Matthew’s cause, and none so blatantly as the Huffington Post, which ran an article with the headline “Hurricane Matthew’s strength is yet another climate change indicator.” Hurricanes, reminds HuffPo reporter Lydia O’Connor, are powered by warm water, and so the presence of a monster storm this late in October suggests the oceans are heating up.
But are they? Contra O’Connor, there’s some evidence that the Atlantic Ocean is entering a cooling phase, according to the meteorologists at Vencore Weather. And while the Pacific and Indian Oceans appear be warming significantly, a NASA study from last year found that this is actually tempering climate change, since extra greenhouse gases are becoming trapped in the water rather than ascending into the atmosphere. You also don’t need extraordinary theories to explain why another category three storm is menacing Florida. “It’s a fairly run of the mill hurricane, actually,” one expert told the Washington Post.
There’s a familiar ring to the climate change admonitions, audible even over the howling wind. After Hurricane Katrina rampaged through the Gulf Coast, progressives warned that she was only a prelude to an onslaught of more frequent and more dangerous storms, fueled by warming waters and caused by man. That year, 2005, seemed to validate their claims, with seven major hurricanes on record, the most since 1961. But after that, the number of major hurricanes dipped back down to normal, averaging about 2.6 over the next 10 years, only a tick above the 2.4 average between 1968 and 2015. Mother Nature likes nothing more than to dash the predictions of hubristic man.
The hubris, in this case, exists primarily on the punditry side of the levy, where self-anointed wonks have become enamored with the idea that they can gaze into the future of irreducibly complex systems. The states of economies—gigantic, chock full of variables, hinging on the irrational decisions made by consumers—are projected months and sometimes even years ahead with definitive phrasing—”American economy to grow by X percent”—only to be regularly revised. In our empirical age, a soothsayer is scoffed out of his carnival tent, but a chart showing the number of Obamacare enrollees 10 years hence is paraded across Vox.com, and then quietly discarded when reality goes its own way.
The same tortured procedure has been applied to our climate. “Predictions put some of South Florida underwater by 2025,” trumpeted a recent CBS headline, a claim even the Oracle of Delphi wouldn’t have been so bold to make. These projections often go awry. Most of the coral islands in the Pacific Ocean, long clamored to be the first victims of climate change, have actually increased in size over the past decade thanks to the adaptability of nearby reefs.
If predictive pundits had anywhere near the level of insight that they claim, America would be on the metric system, the cost of Medicare would be about 90 percent lower, the euro would be a creditable success, and the number of hurricanes would be trending upwards. Alas, they do not. That’s no reason to discredit good climate science, done delicately and approaching unexpected data with an open mind. But the confusion of apocalyptic hypotheses with concrete data by our wonkish elect is another thing entirely. Those on Florida’s east coast are in our thoughts and prayers.