CNN’s John Berman implies Hurricane Harvey tied to climate change, Bill Read cautions against the fake news
A CNN anchor tried to push a climate change narrative on live air Friday while talking to a scientist about Hurricane Harvey, but the scientist cautioned against the rhetoric.
John Berman was talking with Bill Read, the former director of the National Hurricane Center, on Friday when he asked if the intense hurricane that was bearing down on Texas was a result of climate change.
“Is there a why to this? Why there is so much water associated with this storm?” Berman asked. “One thing we heard from scientists over the last 10 years is that climate change does impact the intensity of many of the storms that we see.”
Read responded: “I’m not — I’m probably wouldn’t attribute what we’re looking at here. This is not an uncommon occurrence to see storms grow and intensify rapidly in the western Gulf of Mexico. That’s as long as we’ve been tracking them, that has occurred. The why for the big rain is the stationarity. That fact that the storm is going to come inland and not move…while it has happened in some cases, to have a really big storm come and stall like this is really rare.”
As far as hurricanes go, that narrative is shattered simply by the fact that Harvey was the first major hurricane to make landfall in the U.S. since 2005.
Critics point out that the storm is expected to cause massive flooding because it will move very little over the next three to five days thanks to a stationary cold front — not because of climate change. (Emphasis added, the Dispatch).
According to a recent study from The Global Warming Police Forum, the number of hurricanes occurring annually in the Atlantic basin is decreasing steadily:
In their intriguing analysis published in the Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics, the four-member research team of Rojo-Garibaldi et al. developed a new database of historical hurricane occurrences in the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea, spanning twenty-six decades over the period 1749 to 2012.
Statistical analysis of the record revealed “the hurricane number is actually decreasing in time,” which finding is quite stunning considering that it is quite possible fewer hurricanes were recorded at the beginning of their record when data acquisition was considerably worse than towards the end of the record.
