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