WHAT is the normal person’s reaction to a devastating storm in a distant country, a storm that has swept thousands of helpless people out to sea and flattened hundreds of thousands of homes? The normal person prays for the comfort of the afflicted. The normal person sends a check to a relief organization. The normal person reflects on the fragility of life and the vanity of all things.

But, when a major storm devastates a region, as Typhoon Haiyan has done in the Philippines, the liberal views the catastrophe in light of his political agenda. The storm must be the result of evil Westerners who drive cars. Never mind that this past hurricane season in the Atlantic was uneventful. The liberal never proclaims when storms aren’t happening that catastrophic scenarios related to global warming have been disproved. For the liberal, mankind and life itself are perfectible. Thus even storms are someone’s fault. Curiously, he does not ever seem to entertain the possibility that some storms may be more devastating than they need be because of corrupt or inept officials who allow overbuilding in fragile zones.

Here is a risks assessment map put out by the UN in 2011 which stated that Tacloban, the city hit especially hard by Haiyan, had a 10 percent chance of just such a storm in the next ten years.

According to Science Insider:

Haiyan is the fifth Category 5 storm (the top category) on Earth so far in 2013, Masters says. The global average since 2000 has been 4.4 Category 5s per year, and the record was set in 1997 with 12 of them. September’s massive assessment from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) found only “low confidence” that intense tropical cyclone activity had increased measurably since 1950.

Also:

The IPCC found that, “more likely than not,” global warming will drive an increase in intense tropical cyclone activity in the western North Pacific and North Atlantic by late in this century.

The possibility of somewhat stronger storms is a serious concern and the moral necessity of reducing man-made emissions is indisputable, but one must bear in mind the size and complexity of the atmosphere and the limits of human power.

— Comments —

Sage McLaughlin writes:

The Left’s old mantra, particularly among feminists, was that “the personal is political.”  It turns out that to the Left, so is the impersonal.  Maybe this has something to do with the Left’s deep roots in dialectical materialism, which describes even human politics as the expression of purely material forces.  It is not a very far leap from that view, to the view of purely material forces as the expression of human politics.

Moreover, if Man and his politics are at the center of things, such that nature has to be brought into conformity with them rather than the reverse, then this sort of thinking–that political and economic relationships are sufficient to explain the weather–is inevitable.  So is the belief that legislation passed by Congress will control the temperature of the earth to within a few degrees a hundred years from now, which is the premise of much of the Left’s environmental agenda.

Jane S. writes:

Primitive societies are like that, too. There’s no such thing as a morally neutral event. Every bad thing that happens has to be someone’s fault. If your cow dies or the crops fail, it’s the neighbor’s fault. If a woman outlives her husband, it’s her fault he died. And so on.

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