FOR those who rush to the conclusion that Hurricane Helene was somehow caused either by weather engineers in the government (conservatives) or by global warming (liberals), I urge you to examine some of the storms of the past. Both these scenarios can’t withstand serious consideration.

Hazel (1954 — made landfall in North Carolina as a Category 4; killed 175 in the U.S. and caused the highest wind ever recorded in Philadelphia), Agnes (1972 — more than 43,000 structures were destroyed or severely damaged in Pennsylvania and New Jersey; the city of Wilkes Barre, Pa. never fully recovered), Hugo (1989 — with extensive damage to South Carolina and North Carolina), Floyd (1999 — with 105 mph winds when it made landfall at Cape Fear, NC) and Sandy (2012 — with serious inland damage as far north as New England) — these are some of the hurricanes of the past.

The science for creating and directing major hurricanes is very unlikely. Not that weather engineering doesn’t exist, but this kind of storm involves massive atmospheric systems and trillions of tons of water. It’s beyond human intelligence and means. Real life is not like the recent movie Twisters, where a super-cool and extremely pretty meteorologist is able to calm immense winds by pushing a few buttons. If things were that simple, many of us would have been blown away by now after those dastardly weather schemers sent winds into our communities.

The damage in some cases (I’m not referring to the latest in the Smokey Mountains) is caused by human beings who build in areas prone to flooding or build inadequate levees or dams.

The most amazing thing about the weather is how it follows certain regular laws, even during what to us are catastrophes. This regularity of a vast system of winds and waters, so complex human beings despite eons of study still struggle to make accurate predictions let alone control it, and the fact that we are not all swirled into the void by high winds, are signs of our Creator’s providential care. The weather itself is proof of an Intelligence that governs all. We are subject to a fallen creation, but even so the hurricane, tropical storm and tornado are the exceptions. The sun comes out the next day. Though we should be compassionate after a major storm, where is the gratitude for the thousands of days without major storms?

Here’s a good comment for those in the “catastrophic global warming” category from Spiked:

Each year, hurricane forecasters issue their annual predictions for the Atlantic hurricane season. This year, with the Earth experiencing a temperature spike, there was near unanimity among forecasters that the Atlantic would experience a remarkable jump in hurricane activity, with one news outlet saying this would be a ‘supercharged’ hurricane season. However, the reality thus far, with two-thirds of the season behind us, is that it has been no more eventful than average. Meanwhile, activity in the world’s other oceans has been uniformly low. So much for ‘supercharged’ hurricanes.

If you were to plot a trend over the past 30 years, you would say that, if anything, hurricanes are becoming less frequent and less intense. In truth, records of hurricane activity, like all weather and climate data, are highly variable, trending up or down (or staying the same) for years or decades at a time, then flipping from one ‘regime’ to another, often without apparent cause.

Still, however you look at the data, there is currently very little to justify all the media scaremongering about hurricanes. Indeed, a few years after Al Gore’s film, hurricane activity had fallen close to its lowest level on record. (A few years later it soared for a few years, before falling back to extremely low levels again more recently.)

Nor are hurricanes causing more damage than they used to, although activists like to claim the opposite. To do so, they usually rely on data that hasn’t been corrected for two confounding trends – the growing populations in the path of hurricanes and their growing wealth. Far more people, and far more wealth, is concentrated in places like coastal Florida than 100 years ago, leading to what Bjorn Lomborg calls the ‘expanding bullseye effect’, which gives the impression of more frequent and worse hurricanes, despite what the data actually show.

The same story could be told of other forms of extreme weather, too. According to alarmists, everything is supposed to get worse – flood, drought, rainfall, you name it – but the data shows that none of this has happened yet. Moreover, this is the official view of the IPCC. If you examine the underlying detail of the 2023 report, you are struck less by the small number of things that have changed as a result of global warming – extreme heat and cold, and a few others – and more by the enormous number that haven’t. The IPCC has ‘low confidence’ that the following have worsened or will worsen as a result of global warming: frost, mean precipitation, river floods, heavy rain and flash floods, landslides, aridity, hydrological drought, agricultural and ecological drought, fire weather, mean wind speeds, severe wind storms, tropical cyclones, sand and dust storms, snow, glaciers and ice sheets, heavy snow, ice storms, hail and avalanches. In other words, most forms of extreme weather.

— Comments —

Janice writes:

This is just to thank you for your fact-filled, level-headed article. It says what many need to hear, including myself.

The fear purveyance certainly is strong with the media, isn’t it?

I have a little story about Hurricane Hazel: I was little at the time.

We lived a couple states above where it made landfall, so we were not nearly so affected as the people there, but young as I was I well remember the power outages and flooding in the streets. And how, as the rains started to subside, several neighbor men along with my dad put waders on, brought whatever gear they had that would be useful in the situation and went door to door to see if anyone needed assistance. They checked the streets for debris and downed lines. If there was something they couldn’t handle, they left it for the authorities who came later on.

They got back home after hours of “volunteering”. None of us kids could sleep! I was glad when dad walked in the door, flashlight on in the total darkness and he was alright! There was no light except for his flashlight and the candles my mother lit – and there was a couple feet of black water outside. It was nothing close to disaster, no one was in trouble, hatches were battened down, but that was my young impression of what nature can do; the dark, the wind, endless pounding rain and everything feeling so out of my control! My parents remarked years later that they stayed watching into the night. A few days after the storm, though, it all looked as if nothing had happened!

The weather… as you well wrote – shows God’s goodness to us, and when it is severe, His might and control, so that we may respect Him and realize we are just His creatures, and that we would do well to thank Him often.

(Prayers for the people going through the aftermath of this hurricane. And for those suffering all over the world.)

Laura writes:

Thanks for the memories.

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