Gone, Gone the Damage Done

The financial costs of hurricanes Helene and Milton will exceed anything we’ve experienced in a single hurricane season.  The loss of lives is also significant and still counting. For many survivors, their world has been turned upside down and may never recover.  This would certainly be the case in many mountain communities in Western North Carolina.  The devastation there is almost unimaginable.  Parts of the Florida Gulf Coast have been transformed.  Some residents have had enough and will move inland or out of the state.  Hurricanes are a reality for Florida and there will be more.

 

The politics of hurricanes and hurricane relief are in full swing.  The Right is pointing fingers at what they claim is a poor response.  That poor response being the result of federal agency incompetence along with too much money spent on immigrants and other nations.  The Left’s response is they are doing a good job and those who claim otherwise are misinformed or worse, spreading that misinformation.  The Left is also seizing on these disasters to once again make their case that human caused global warming, largely caused by fossil fuel, is the real problem.

 

At the risk of being labeled a “climate change denier”, it’s worth pointing to the data. This is a link to some very interesting data from the NOAA National Hurricane Center U.S. Hurricane Strikes by Decade (noaa.gov).  You can read it for yourself and reach your own conclusions, but I would draw your attention to the note just below the data records.

There are two sides to the hurricane story.  The mainstream version claims that even IF we are not having more hurricanes, we are having more major hurricanes. Again, the data to support that claim is questionable at best.  One thing is certain. Hurricanes are doing more damage now than in the past.  The same can be said of tornadoes and hailstorms and wildfires. Today there are simply more people and more structures in places where hurricanes (and tornadoes and hailstorms and wildfires) are most likely to hit.

The questions we must answer:

_1 How much has human activity contributed to climate change?

_2 How much can humans do now to change the climate to something more favorable?

_3 Should we spend more money trying to change the earth’s climate or spend more money preparing to live with the earth’s climate?

_4 And of course the most pressing question: What can we do for the folks who lost so much to Helene and Milton?

                                                             Galveston, Texas 1900