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October 6, 2022

Hurricane Ian was the only major tropical storm to strike the U.S. so far this season, but it was a powerful one — among the most powerful in U.S. history.  Parts of southwest and central Florida suffered extensive damage and loss of life.  And right on cue, climate alarmists are pointing to this as evidence of the “catastrophe” we face unless we eliminate fossil fuels.

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For environmental radicals, Ian is proof that storms are getting stronger and more frequent and that seas are rising, but just shouting “climate change” doesn’t explain much about what is really happening — and it is useless as a tool for future policy-making.

To begin, hurricanes have not been striking the U.S. more often, nor are they more deadly.  In the five-year period between 2017 and 2021, there were 16 U.S. landfalls, seven of them deemed “major hurricanes” by NOAA, with a total altogether of seven fatalities.

By comparison, in that same period, there were some 3,500 murders in Chicago alone and over 80,000 in the U.S. as a whole.  Hurricanes are spectacular, and they cause a great deal of property damage, but they are not catastrophic in terms of loss of life and need not be catastrophic in terms of property damage.  Even with Ian, the fourth strongest storm ever, the death toll stands at 68.  That many are murdered in Chicago every month.

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I don’t wish to minimize the suffering caused by Hurricane Ian.  Along with the loss of life, tens of thousands are homeless, thousands of businesses have been damaged or destroyed, and hundreds of thousands lost power and clean water, at least for a time.  The truth is that hurricanes have become far less costly in terms of human life, but a storm like Ian can be extremely costly to property in some localized areas.

Again the facts: Storms like Ian and Katrina are extremely powerful, and at the same time, seas have been slowly rising.  But there have always been powerful hurricanes, and seas have risen less than a foot over the last 125 years.  To be precise, the seas rose an estimated 6.7 inches in the 20th century, and a 2007 IPCC report predicted a rise of between 7 inches and 1.9 feet for the 21st century.  That estimate has since been raised, by some at least, based on so-called scientific models, to an upper limit of 4.9 feet by 2100.  But since sea levels have risen only 3 inches in the past 25 years, they have a long way to go to make 4.9 feet or even 1.9 feet by 2100.

The real reason behind increasing property damage is over-development on barrier islands and in low-lying coastal areas.

Even some mainstream news commentators are beginning to realize this.  Just after Ian struck, AP reporters Ben Finley and Steve Helber published an analysis of “the risks and costs of living on barrier islands.”  Finley and Helber quote a Tulane professor who states: “We can’t build back everything to what it was — we can’t afford that.”

Nor should we build back there.

Tropical storms have been striking North America for eons, with little damage or loss of life until humans began building in low-lying coastal areas.  The devastating Galveston hurricane of  September 1990 produced waves of 9 to 12 feet (even before “climate change”); the elevation of Galveston is 7 feet.  The hurricane inundated nearly all of the city and killed some 8,000 residents of the area.  At the time, Galveston was a boom-town based on its busy port trade.  In just the decade before the storm, the population had grown from 31,000 to some 38,000.  Thousands of homes had been built on land that was barely above sea level.  It was inevitable that Galveston would be inundated sooner or later, but the building continued.