Eric Berger probably isn’t a bad man.
It’s likely that the senior space editor for Ars Technica is a pleasant neighbor, tips his servers adequately, and doesn’t abuse animals. Berger’s pretty good at his job, too. His book Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceX is excellent.
But Berger has chosen to be a Doom Drone. Following his tribe, he eschews intellectual curiosity and scientific humility, preferring the comfort, convenience, and compensation of the climate cult.
On August 1st, Berger posted his dire feelings. He was “watching the approach of the peak of this … hurricane season warily.” The Atlantic, “particularly in areas where hurricanes commonly form,” was “absolutely sizzling.” The United Kingdom’s Meteorological Office envisioned “a very busy season indeed.” As “a meteorologist and a Gulf Coast resident,” he was “concerned, very concerned, about the next two months.”
It’s been two months. How did Berger’s gloomy prophesy fare?
Not well. Idalia made landfall in August, primarily impacting North Florida. In September, Lee brushed by the Northeast. Presently, Philippe — a storm, not a hurricane — is east of Puerto Rico, and USA TODAY admits it is “not forecast to have any direct impact on the United States.” What’s on deck? According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, “[t]ropical cyclone formation is not expected during the next 7 days.”
Combined, Idalia and Lee directly killed 10 Americans. Unfortunate, to be sure, but a mere 9 percent of the lives lost in U.S. automobile accidents every day in 2022.
Berger’s concern was wildly unwarranted. Think anyone will call him out?
Okay, just kidding.
The errors of hurricane prognostication are rarely exposed. A notable exception occurred in 2010, when investigative journalist Jeff Burnside, then with NBC’s Miami affiliate, reviewed “nearly a decade of pre-season predictions of hurricane season” by “the two major predicting institutions.” Their overall success rate was “rather poor” — falling “within … range” only “about half the time.”
Five years earlier, the double strikes of Katrina and Wilma handed professional weather worrywarts a weapon they couldn’t resist. A truly miserable year for hurricane carnage, 2005 was relentlessly pitched to the public as a preview of coming destructions. CBS’s Russ Mitchell offered perhaps the “best” fearmongering. A few weeks after Katrina, he warned of “continued high levels of hurricane activity and high levels of hurricane landfalls for the next decade or perhaps even longer.” There was “no end in sight.”
But just like the Maldives’ pesky failure to sink beneath the waves by 2018 and the Arctic’s stubborn refusal to go ice-free, reality did not oblige apocalyptics’ asininity. Instead, a record-breaking drought developed. No major (i.e., Category 3 or worse) hurricane hit the United States between October 2005 and August 2017. The 4,324-day stretch was the longest since records began in 1851.
Piling on, credible scholars issued a steady stream of “lighten up, Francis” research. In 2018, Philip J. Klotzbach, Steven G. Bowen, Roger Pielke Jr., and Michael Bell concluded that in the continental U.S., “since 1900 neither observed … landfalling hurricane frequency nor intensity shows significant trends.” In 2021, Gabriel A. Vecchi, Christopher Landsea, Wei Zhang, Gabriele Villarini, and Thomas Knutson crafted a “homogenization method for Atlantic hurricane and major hurricane frequency over 1851–2019.” They found that “increases in basin-wide hurricane and major hurricane activity since the 1970s are not part of a century-scale increase, but a recovery from a deep minimum in the 1960s–1980s.” In 2022, a postdoctoral researcher with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution supplied data that The Heartland Institute’s H. Sterling Burnett argues “clearly demonstrates that there have been multiple periods in the past, when carbon dioxide concentrations were much lower than at present, when hurricane frequency and severity was greater.”
Finally, as Anthony Watts inconveniently noted, the deeply flawed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change itself “says it finds low scientific confidence in the existence of any visible ‘global warming’ effects in the form of weather extremes,” including hurricanes — as well as sand/dust storms, river flooding, coastal flooding, avalanches, frost, hail, and landslides. (Evidently, the science is far from “settled.”)
Does Eric Berger know any of this? Maybe. But he definitely knows that pushing the climate-calamity myth won’t jeopardize his next book deal with HarperCollins Publishers. And that “I share your frustration, but this matter is immensely complicated and we simply don’t possess the level of understanding, and cannot build sophisticated-enough models, to make accurate predictions about hurricanes” doesn’t drive clicks.
For science, skepticism is essential. In the worst-case-scenarioing industry, it’s deadlier than a Category 5.
Thanks for the humor. I guess I'm not generally fear driven at this point of my life.
Everybody needs to read "Democrats Hate America" to better understand the economical, sociological and meteorological games the Marxist Communist Democrats are playing on the American people. It's been over 100 years in the making, but it is a very evil and destructive game on America!!