A new study alleges that human-induced global warming is a fundamental cause behind the 7.1 trillion gallons of torrential rainfall that a storm dumped on Louisiana in August, leading to a flooding disaster that killed at least 13 people and caused more than $1 billion in damage.
Despite the fact that the study never establishes a causal correlation between the Louisiana flooding and the presence of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, nor between the presence of greenhouse gases and human behavior, they still manage to reach the remarkable conclusion that human behavior is somehow behind the flooding.
The methodology of the study, in fact, relied on comparisons with “the historical record and climate model simulations,” analyzing not the causes of the Louisiana flood, but the probability of its occurrence. To extrapolate from this merely statistical analysis a series of inferences regarding human behavior seems irresponsible in the extreme.
Moreover, while the stated purpose of the study was to “assess the potential link between the extreme amount of precipitation that fell over three days across parts of Louisiana and human-caused climate change,” the researchers never even bothered to try to ascertain how much of “climate change” is ascribable to human behavior and how much must be attributed to “natural causes.”
Instead, they took the strikingly unscientific approach of simply attributing all climate change to humans as a given, without bothering to analyze whether that is in fact the case. The fact that the earth’s climate underwent frequent and massive changes long before the industrial revolution seems to have escaped the researchers as worthy of note.
This allowed the team to come to the conclusion that by the end of the current century, “if greenhouse gases continue to increase as projected, their impact will further increase the probability of an event like the one observed August 12th-14th.” They came to this conclusion without ever having established any causal correlation between greenhouse gases and the Louisiana flooding.
“Global warming” has become the universal bugaboo behind all meteorological events, so that what used to be referred to as “acts of God”—given the random nature of meteorological cycles—are now attributed to acts of man as a matter of course.
Just this week, manmade global warming has been blamed for the elimination of lizards (40% of our lizard population will be dead by 2080!), the collapse of Hawaiian forest birds (multiple extinctions are likely in the next decade!), and even tied to racism (perpetrated by wealthy whites against poor, vulnerable blacks!).
Reading the “fine print” on these studies, however, reveals a stunning level of speculation, inference and projection far beyond what the actual data show.
One can only speculate what caused the countless earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, volcanoes, tidal waves, cyclones and droughts that have regularly occurred throughout human history and even in prehistoric times, before humans had invented aerosol sprays, air conditioning and the internal combustion engine.
It is also worthwhile to recall how easily climate change hysteria has changed its garb in recent decades.
In October, 1974, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), an agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce, published an advisory, saying that global cooling threatened the planet with “ominous” implications for global food and population policies.
Many climatologists have associated this drought and other recent weather anomalies with a global cooling trend and changes in atmospheric circulation which, if prolonged, pose serious threats to major food-producing regions of the world.
The same year, Time Magazine similarly proposed that the earth was heading into another ice age, after extreme drought struck African nations and “record rains in parts of the U.S., Pakistan and Japan caused some of the worst flooding in centuries.”
Anyone who has ever planned a picnic, relying on meteorologists’ predictions of a sunny day, only to find their excursion ruined by a torrential downpour may well be skeptical when the same scientists propose to predict what the weather will be doing 10, 20 or 50 years from now.
To radically alter human behavior based on such wild speculation seems the epitome of foolishness.
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