Where are the Hurricanes, Mr. Gore?

By Alan Caruba

That god among men and Nobel Peace Prize winner, Al Gore, told us in “An Inconvenient Truth”, his Oscar-winning documentary, that we had to brace for increasing numbers of hurricanes as the result of global warming.

So, where are the hurricanes of 2009, Mr. Gore?

The hurricane season that runs from June through October is about to end with nothing more than one weak to borderline moderate tropical storm that hit Florida’s panhandle, but there have been NO hurricanes.

So, where are the hurricanes of 2009, Mr. Gore?

Trying to predict how many hurricanes there will be each year is probably fun, but is a highly risky undertaking. I have a lot of friends among the meteorological and climatological community, men of science, but I always cross my fingers for them when they take a run at it.

This year, Bill Gray of Colorado State, perhaps the best known among the hurricane forecasters, thought there would be at least 7 hurricanes of which 3 would be major. Weather Services Inc. agreed with Dr. Gray and, over at Accuweather, the prediction was for 8 hurricanes of which 2 would be major.

NOAA and the National Weather Service do not predict hurricanes, but as political as well as scientific entities they have a very bad track record of trying to confirm Al Gore’s global warming claims.

In March, William J. Broad, reporting in The New York Times, noted that Gore’s “scientific audience is uneasy” in the wake of his global warming documentary. “These scientists argue that some of Mr. Gore’s central points are exaggerated and erroneous. They are alarmed, some say, at what they call his alarmism.”

In Great Britain, a judge ruled that the documentary could not be shown in the schools unless teachers read a long list of its erroneous claims.

Since an increase in hurricanes was one of his dramatic claims along with rising sea levels and disappearing polar bears, Gore is batting zero these days. The sea levels have been rising a few inches every century for millennia and it is generally conceded that the polar bear population since the 1950s has been thriving.

In May, hurricane specialist Chris Landsea of the National Hurricane Center in Miami disputed theories that “global warming” has caused more hurricanes. His study was published in The Journal of Climate.

Landsea, like all meteorologists who haven’t been in a coma since the 1980s, knows that the Earth has been in a cooling cycle since 1998. Thus, the warmth that feeds hurricanes has diminished and is likely to stay that way for decades to come.

Landsea’s research showed that, since the mid-1990s, the average number of hurricanes per year had almost doubled what it was during the few prior decades, about on par with hurricane activity in the early 20th century. “It’s busy, yes, but not anything we haven’t seen before,” said Landsea while attending the Florida Governor’s Hurricane Conference in May.

For the non-scientist, that should confirm that hurricanes are governed by natural cycles, not some non-existent, dramatic increase called “global warming.”

Though what I know about hurricanes would fit comfortably in a bug’s ear, I am nonetheless tempted to suggest that the cooling cycle the Earth entered in 1998 may be a contributing factor to why this year’s hurricane season is, at this writing, minus any hurricanes.

So, where are the hurricanes of 2009, Mr. Gore?

Known as “the Gore factor”, it is the irony of blizzards or severe snow storms that seem to follow him around whenever he delivered one of his “global warming” speeches.

It is my profound prayer that, in December when the United Nations climate conference convenes to issue an international treaty based on the Great Global Warming Lie, that the city of Copenhagen gets hit by a blizzard so great that the delegates cannot leave their plush hotels for days.

Alan Caruba, a science and business writer, blogs at http://factsnotfantasy.blogspot.com.