Hurricane-free Florida Hurricane Season and “Global Warming”

Article audio sponsored by The John Birch Society

This year’s hurricane season officially ended on November 30 without Florida — a state traditionally a prime target for such storms — experiencing even one major tropical storm. It also marked the 10th consecutive year that Florida has avoided having a hurricane make landfall, the last being Wilma on October 24, 2005.

Meteorologists have offered several explanations for Florida’s good fortune, the most commonly cited being a strong El Niño (a naturally occurring warming of Pacific Ocean temperatures) this year. An El Niño typically produces stronger hurricane activity in the central and eastern Pacific basins, while suppressing it in the Atlantic basin. Another phenomenon, the Bermuda High, a high-pressure area over the western Atlantic, caused several storms to divert to the north, thereby missing Florida.

A report posted at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) website quoted Gerry Bell, Ph.D., lead seasonal hurricane forecaster at NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center, who said:

El Niño produces a see-saw effect, suppressing the Atlantic season while strengthening the eastern and central Pacific hurricane seasons. El Niño intensified into a strong event during the summer and significantly impacted all three hurricanes seasons during their peak months.

Weather experts were quick to warn that Florida owes much of its calm weather to chance, however, and warned against complacency. Southeast Florida’s Sun-Sentinel quoted Frank Marks, director of NOAA’s Hurricane Research Division in Miami, who said: “There’s no magic bullet or changes in the weather patterns protecting us. We’re going to have more landfalls; history and statistics tell us that.”

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The belief that Florida’s respite from major hurricanes has been due more to randomness than anything else was expressed by others. “Just because we’ve had a good string of luck doesn’t mean it’s going to continue the next year,” the Miami Herald quoted Michael Brennan, a senior hurricane specialist at the National Hurricane Center, as saying. “Storms go where they’re going to go.”

While some global-warming alarmists blame nearly all weather phenomena — even favorable ones — on “global warming,” experts warned against drawing such a conclusion. The Sun-Sentinel cited a statement by Bryan Norcross, a hurricane specialist for The Weather Channel, saying that any such effect of heat in the atmosphere is too subtle to draw conclusions about long-term weather trends.

Since the most frequently cited explanation for the period changes in hurricane activity, either stronger or weaker, is the existence of the Pacific El Niño (along with its periodic cooling counterpart, La Niña), it is worth remembering that while El Niño has an effect on global weather conditions, it is itself a natural periodic occurrence. An article (“A Brief Introduction of El Niño”) posted by the Bright Hub Technology, Science, and Education information website explains the history behind El Niño and notes that it was first observed by fishermen of the northwestern coast of South America hundreds of years ago. This was centuries before the industrial age produced “carbon emissions” in the atmosphere. However, El Niño is much older than human records. The article notes: “Based on evidence from ancient Pacific coral skeletons, El Niño events have been occurring for at least 125 thousand years.”

It is obvious from this lengthy history that the El Niño/ La Niña phenomenon responsible for the cycles in hurricane activity is a natural periodic phenomenon, as are periods of global warming and cooling. Yet proponents of the current global-warming scare insist that a recent warming trend (which is, itself, unproven, with some climate experts saying the climate has actually cooled in recent years) is caused by anthropogenic (human) carbon dioxide emissions.

Even if it were true that human-caused carbon dioxide could warm the planet, data shows that that wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing. Historic records show many periods of widespread cooling and warming, and periods of global cooling, rather than warming, have been most disastrous for the human race. In an article for The New American posted on November 19, William F. Jasper cited an essay on the climate website WattsUpWithThat. Notes Jasper:

Canadian environmental scientist Dr. Tim Ball provides some much-needed perspective on the climate changes of the past, particularly focusing on the extremely harsh cold spell at the start of the 18th century. Entitled, “1709: The Disparate Economic And Political Impact of Weather And Climate”, Dr. Ball’s investigation makes effective use of diaries and scientific reports from the era to provide a stark picture of the unforgiving nature of the hardships during the period known as the Little Ice Age (LIA). The LIA, a period that stretched roughly from the 14th century to the mid-19th century, followed the Medieval Warm Period (MWP, also known as the Medieval Climate Optimum), which ran from around AD 950-1300.

Ball also notes that periodic climate change is easily observable even during the lifespan of one individual, writes Jasper:

“If you are 80 years old, you have lived through four climate changes,” Dr. Ball notes,” pointing to “the warming from 1900 to 1940, the cooling from 1940 to 1980, the warming from 1980 to 2000 and the slight cooling from 2000 to the present.” “There are individual years within each period that had a significant impact,” Ball points out: “The summer of 1934, the winter of 1936, the winter of 1947 and so on.”

In an article posted online on December 1, (The “Climate Change” Issue Really Bugs Me) former Representative Ron Paul referred to the historic nature of natural climate change:

The whole climate change issue bugs me because it’s so distorted. If you look at geologic history, even before there were significant numbers of humans on Earth, the variations in temperatures were much greater. There were ice ages, and periods of warming, etc. If anything, the radical changes in climate have been smoothed out!

While the scientists argue the merits (or lack thereof) of the various global-warming theories, the biggest threat to our well-being is economic rather than climatic. “Progressives” in government are attempting to use unproven theories to impose stringent environmental regulations on American industry that accomplish nothing more than making their production more expensive, eliminating jobs and driving up prices.

To deter the economic damage already being caused by government action, the House of Representatives on December 1 passed a pair of resolutions that would prevent the Environmental Protection Agency from implementing rules the administration released earlier this year to curb so-called greenhouse gas emissions. The resolutions were already approved by the Senate in October, and now go to the White House, where President Obama has already vowed to veto them.

If Florida is enjoying a respite from hurricanes, or if hurricanes return next year; if this winter is exceptionally cold (or exceptionally mild), and if next summer is exceptionally hot or cool, human carbon emissions will likely have little to do with it. That is the way global weather has always played out, and always will.

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