Climate Change Advocates Use ‘Harvey’ to Tout Global Warming

Climate Change Advocates Use ‘Harvey’ to Tout Global Warming, by Lana Shadwick.

Activists wasted no time in using Hurricane Harvey to tout their political agenda of climate change and global warming. Some even said those in the region deserved the storm because of their disbelief in the climate notion. Others jabbed at the president for his policies.

Harvey is the first hurricane to hit Texas since 2008, and the first big hurricane to hit the US since Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005. There have been 63 big hurricanes to make landfall in Texas since 1850, so the last few years have seen a lull — the opposite to what the warmist propagandists were touting. It’s the same all over the world.

The increased carbon dioxide and surface temperatures of the last five decades have increased  evaporation off the oceans. (The link between increased carbon dioxide and surface warming is not empirically established. The warming is most likely caused predominately by the Sun indirectly affecting cloud levels. Whatever the cause, increased evaporation is a fact.)

So the lower troposphere (up to 6 km) both gets moister (this has been observed, it’s not just theoretical), and has more energy (presumably, since its warmer).

But here is the conundrum:

  • A moister lower troposphere is more stable, implying fewer hurricanes.
  • More energy in the lower troposphere implies more unstable weather, such as more hurricanes.

The climate modelers don’t know which tendency wins out, and have been very cautious about making a prediction. But the political warmists (aka propagandists) have been screaming for more than a decade that there will be more extreme weather and more hurricanes — not because there are any firm scientific predictions, but because it might happen and anyway it suits them.

The empirical evidence is becoming fairly clear. Increased stability due to extra moisture is winning out over the instability caused by more energy in the system. The extreme weather aspect of the global warming scare is a bust.

hat-tip Scott of the Pacific, Charles