Chris Cuomo, the amateur climatologist and brother of New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, discussed Hurricane Harvey on his CNN show this week. Cuomo suggested that human emissions of carbon dioxide may be “why these storms happen.”
We know cable news suffers from a short attention span, so we’d like to suggest Cuomo take time over the long weekend to read up on hurricanes that occurred even before the Industrial Revolution.
But Cuomo also clearly needs to read some of the scientific literature on weather and climate. He suggested that if the White House focussed on climate policy, “we could figure out a way to reduce the number of these storms.”
No serious person believes that climate policy could bring us into a brave new world of fewer hurricanes. And if the number of large hurricanes we get is determined by policy, Trump ought to do whatever George W. Bush did in 2006 that put the brakes on powerful hurricanes for a decade.
Cuomo, packaging his faux science and total lack of historical context together with an ideological smugness, is typical of left-leaning politicians and journalists in the media these days.
Liberals have been crying wolf on this issue for more than a decade. “A link between climate change and more destructive hurricanes hints at the real-world impacts of this administration’s refusal to get serious about tackling the threat of global warming,” Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., said in October 2006. “It’s hard to think of a louder wake-up call than the destruction left in the wake of hurricanes Katrina and Rita.”
Former Vice President Al Gore used a satellite photograph of Hurricane Katrina to illustrate the poster for his 2006 documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth,” and the movie all but asserted that global warming would produce more Katrinas.
