The Weather: The 2009 Atlantic hurricane season is over. Activity was light. More wind will be stirred up next week in Copenhagen, where climate change alarmists will gather to refuel their fear campaign.
The warnings were ominous. Noting the destruction left behind in 2005 by Hurricane Katrina, warm-mongers told us that our carbon dioxide emissions were going to bring more severe storms.
Journalist and author Ross Gelbspan wasted little time in issuing what he probably thought was the definitive statement on the Katrina disaster. "The hurricane that struck Louisiana yesterday was nicknamed Katrina by the National Weather Service," he wrote in the Boston Globe. "Its real name was global warming."
A few days later, former Vice President Al Gore, godfather of the global warming scare, said that "the science is extremely clear now, that warmer oceans make the average hurricane stronger, not only makes the winds stronger, but dramatically increases the moisture from the oceans evaporating into the storm — thus magnifying its destructive power — makes the duration, as well as the intensity of the hurricane, stronger."
In case the public couldn't make out the link that Gore was laying out, a poster promoting his 2006 movie, "An Inconvenient Truth," showed industrial smokestacks spewing out — you guessed it — a hurricane.
Then there was Kerry Emanuel, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor known as a leading hurricane researcher. Global warming would generate more intense hurricane activity, he believed, and the alarmists naturally seized on his work.
But then some funny things happened.
First, Emanuel reconsidered his position. "The models are telling us something quite different from what nature seems to be telling us," he told New York Times science blogger Andrew Revkin last year.
Then this year's Atlantic hurricane season turned out to be a dud. Among nine named storms, only three reached hurricane status. It was, the AP reports, "the quietest hurricane season since 2006, when none of the nine storms hit the U.S. coast. The calmest season before that was in 1997, which had just seven storms."
No Katrinas. No Ritas. No Ivans. Yet our carbon dioxide emissions keep going up. Atmospheric levels are at roughly 385 parts per million compared with 280 parts per million before the Industrial Revolution.
The environmentalist-media complex has stretched the truth about global warming about as far it can go. The facts are rolling over the alarmists in a Category 5 storm.
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