Thursday, September 01, 2011

Blowin' in the Wind - Tropical Storm Irene

Hurricane Irene was not nearly as windy as the politicians and warmists proclaiming it a harbinger of our climate future. As always, such talk inspired me to seek truth in science studies and climate histories. A 2011 study of 2,200 years of North Carolina’s Barrier Island storm history (the area most affected by Irene) concluded that climatic conditions of both the Medieval Warm Period (850 to 1350AD) and Little Ice Age (1350 to 1850AD) compared to the present show "a general decrease in storminess" reflecting "more stable climate conditions (and) fewer storm impacts, and a decrease in the average wind intensity and wave energy," which suggests that the mean temperature of the past century has been neither as cold nor as warm as it was during the LIA and MWP, respectively.


In 1938 a Category 3 hurricane struck Long Island, killing between 682 and 800 people, damaging or destroying over 57,000 homes, and causing property losses estimated at $4.77 billion (2011 dollars). It’s still the most powerful, costliest, and deadliest hurricane in New England history.

Earlier, in 1815 a Category 3 hurricane hit New York City directly, causing extensive damage and creating an inlet that separated two Long Island resort towns into two separate barrier islands

In 1821 a Category 4 storm created the highest recorded storm surge in Manhattan of nearly 13 feet.

The 1869 Saxby Gale decimated the Maine coastline and the Canadian Outer Banks

In 1893 a Category 2 hurricane directly hit New York City, causing a great storm surge that pummeled the coastline, completely removing Long Island’s Hog Island resort.

Irene, a tropical storm when it reached New York which never made landfall as a hurricane, is much ado about nothing; panicked politicians and whacky warmists – excuse redundancies – foolishly hitched onto this global warming bandwagon.

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