Blame for Disaster

by John Stossel

"How many once-in-a-lifetime storms will it take," demands "The Daily Show" comic Trevor Noah, "until everyone admits man-made climate change is real?!" His audience roars its approval. When Hurricane Irma hit, so-called friends admonished me, "Look what your fossil fuels have done! Will you finally admit you are wrong?" No. It's the alarmists who are wrong -- on so many levels. First, two big storms don't mean much. The global warming activists must know that because when Donald Trump joked about a lack of warming on a snowy day, they lectured us about how "weather is not climate -- one snow storm is irrelevant to long-term climate." They were right then. But now that bad weather has come, they change their tune. Time magazine reported confidently, "Climate change makes the hurricane season worse." But Irma and Harvey came after a record 12 years without any Category 3-5 storms. Over those 12 years, did Time say the absence of storms proved climate change fear exaggerated? No. Of course not. It seems logical that warmer water may make storms worse, but there's no proof of that. The government's own National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says neither its models "nor our analyses of trends in Atlantic hurricane and tropical storm counts over the past 120-plus years support the notion that greenhouse gas-induced warming leads to large increases in either tropical storm or overall hurricane numbers." As Irma approached, The Washington Post ran an even dumber headline: "Irma and Harvey Should Kill Any Doubt That Climate Change Is Real." That's phrased to make any skeptic look ridiculous. Of course climate change is real! Climate changes -- it always has and always will. For the past 300 years, since "the little ice age," the globe warmed about three degrees. The warming started well before man emitted much carbon. So the real unanswered questions are: 1. Will climate change become a crisis? (We face immediate crises now: poverty, terrorism, a $20 trillion debt, rebuilding after the hurricanes) 2. Is there anything we can do about it? (No. Not now; the science isn't there yet.) 3. Did man's burning fossil fuels increase the warming? (Probably. But we don't know how much.)...more