Nature – from Beauty to Beast
As relatively poor immigrants from Finland, my parents liked to spend weekends augmenting our food supply. In the days of mid-summer, it was hours of picking blueberries – the entire family participated. With no obstruction of sunlight from trees or large shrubs, the best locations for picking seemed to be regions of wildfire burn. There were times we would come upon areas absolutely carpeted in blue – an 8-quart basket could be picked with very little movement from a single squatting position.
At the ripe age of 18, I saw my very first mountain. It was an early mid-autumn morning, the sun just beginning to rise, and the clicking of the wheels on rails was beginning to slow – I awoke just as we were about to enter the train station at Jasper, Alberta. The majesty of the mountains was like a postcard or only in panoramic pictures I had seen in magazines. They were awe-inspiring and well beyond any expectation of my youthful imagination.
Years later, my wife and I climbed several mountains in and around our home in Southwestern Montana. The view from each summit was magnificent, even glorious. Throughout life, nature seemed to fill me with wonder, but at times, and many times it can also fill people with sadness, extreme anxiety, and hardship. It is then we need to lend a hand rather than use it as an egocentric opportunity.
In questioning Jamie Rhome, the acting director of NOAA’s National Hurricane Center located in the Miami branch of the National Weather Service, on Hurricane Ian CNN’s Don Lemon asked, “Can you tell us what this is and what effect climate change has on this phenomena?”
Rhome cautioned Lemon against directly linking the hurricane or any specific event to climate change. Despite the admonition, near the end of the segment Lemon said, “Listen, I grew up there, and these storms are intensifying — something is causing them to intensify,”
Recently demoted from hosting a primetime CNN broadcast called, “CNN Tonight” to co-hosting the CNN morning show, Lemon was born and grew up in Louisiana, so I am not sure why he explicitly said, “I grew up there”. Perhaps in this new woke society, we can ‘identify’ as being from elsewhere. Furthermore though, Lemon is 56 years old, so not exactly an elderly person’s worth of personal storm experience.
Naturally, Lemon was not alone in blaming Hurricane Ian on human-induced climate change. Most legacy media outlets endeavored to make that same claim, while progressive politicians gave us full assurance of climate change as an unconditional fact. Many of those interviewed did not even bestow any compassion or sympathy for the people and businesses of Florida, before going headlong and headfirst into the climate change blame game.
As Dr. Roy Spencer climatologist, a Principal Climate Research Scientist at the University of Alabama and former Senior Scientist for Climate Studies at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center says, “If global warming is causing a change in tropical cyclone activity, it should show up in global statistics”. But of course, it does not.
Spencer says while there has been a slight uptick in hurricane activity in the Atlantic region, it has been more than neutralized by the decrease in cyclones in the Pacific. Cyclones differentiate in name and location only from hurricanes. The two storms are naturally connected since climate change is considered a worldwide human-caused phenomenon.
It was interesting in some of the comments by the internet climate trolls who claimed that there was an increase in hurricanes in the Atlantic. They must not have fully read or completely understood Spencer’s article. He said as much, but that the reduction of activity in the Pacific neutralized ‘global’ numbers.
Climate change advocates persistently cherry-pick statistics. In the linked story, Spencer provides graphs and details.