Hurricane Be America’s ‘Chernobyl Moment’?
The usual suspects are in the usual high dudgeon about Hurricane Helene, with one writer on UnHerd calling it “America’s Chernobyl moment” and for bad measure adding “bringing once-in-a-thousand-years levels of rainfall”.
A piece in The Atlantic explained that flood risk maps can’t be trusted “in a rapidly changing climate”. Harper’s Bazaar went with “I Never Thought Climate Change Would Drive Me From My Mountain Home”. And David Wallace-Wells galloped through the streets of the New York Times hollering the climate is coming, the climate is coming while the populace slumbered, prompting.
“You might have thought, not that long ago, that the arrival of extreme weather could wake us up, belatedly, from climate complacency. But the dull drumbeat of disaster seems almost to be putting us to sleep instead.”
Except that what arrived was a hurricane during hurricane season, which is not without precedent, and this season, despite one bad storm and worse government response, and even with more of both to follow, has been comparatively quiet contrary to alarmist predictions.
Now Wallace-Wells does have a point that people were strangely inert as the storm approached. Which might be due in part to repeated crying of wolf, but let it pass. Apart from sneering at Heatmap’s excuse for the bad prediction that:
“at the same time technology has improved oversight of these storms, with artificial intelligence models that have raised the bar for prediction accuracy and the ability to deploy radar systems as they pass overhead, climate change is altering the ingredients that feed their formation.”
Maybe you should have said something back in May… unless you’re just making it up as you go along. Which they seem to be, as Heatmap also emailed:
“In May, NOAA predicted that up to 25 named storms could occur during the 2024 hurricane season — the greatest number of named storms ever estimated by the agency. Then … things got quiet. That lasted until Friday, when Hurricane Helene ripped through the southeastern U.S., leaving a six-state-long path of destruction that has landed it comparisons to Katrina and Sandy.
With another month of hurricane season left to go, the National Hurricane Center is now tracking five additional storm systems in the Atlantic, two of which could potentially make their way to the U.S. (one, in the Gulf of Mexico, could even follow in Helene’s path). The season is not over; it might just be getting started.”
And no sum is too high to pay for that sort of rigorous prediction.
What we won’t let pass is the attribution journalism that promptly followed. Wallace-Wells insists that:
“The intense rainfall was made, over the last week, perhaps 50 percent more intense over parts of Georgia and the Carolinas by global warming. (Other rapid assessments suggested it was perhaps only 20 percent more intense.)”
Quite the error bar. Could be 50 percent “over parts” of three states, or 20 percent. Or not.
In any case, as Tony Heller promptly observed:
“Miami and Fort Lauderdale were largely destroyed by a hurricane in 1926. Atmospheric CO2 levels were close to 300PPM.”
A contemporary news clipping shows fears of 1,000 dead, far higher than from Helene. And Steve Milloy contributed the archival news there was devastating flooding in newly-afflicted Asheville, NC back in 1940, and in 1916, so bad that generations later locals could point to watermarks on their walls from it. What can explain all that rainfall since climate didn’t change until 1988 or so?
As Heller snidely X-quizzed:
“If the same weather occurs as a century ago, what does that mean? 1) Climate has changed 2) Climate hasn’t changed”
Seriously, folks. A news story Heller pointed to, rather unexpectedly coming from the USA Today Network, compared the “Great Flood of 1916” in Asheville to the damage in 2024 and said:
“Dubbed as the ‘Great Flood,’ the flood of 1916 unleashed inconceivable devastation, caused by heavy rainfall produced by a series of hurricanes. ‘It was more than a universal cloudburst in all this mountain country,’ reported the Newton Enterprise back in July 25, 1916. ‘It was a night of tempest and terror.’”
Series of hurricanes? Heavy rainfall? Must be the CO2, right? Evidently it was “the worst natural disaster in the recorded history of Western North Carolina”. And despite claims that Helene proves climate change because it got so far inland, this one started with a landfall in Alabama then a separate one in South Carolina, both of which got into the North Carolina backcountry and:
“Record rainfall was widespread. Reports state that between July 15-16, 22.22 inches of rain fell over parts of Western North Carolina.”
Now just imagine what they’d be saying if it happened today. Right. The intense rainfall was made perhaps 50 percent more intense over parts of Alabama and the Carolinas by global warming. Which would explain why:
“‘The French Broad river, which flows through Asheville and west into the Tennessee river, crested an estimated 17 feet above flood stage,’ reported the [National Weather Service].
‘Even higher readings, up to 23 feet above previous high water records, were recorded along the Catawba River, which flows out of the mountains southeast to near Charlotte and into South Carolina.’”
Yup. What an Atlantic writer called “100-, maybe 1,000-year flood“ of the sort they often get, and all our fault. Do they know no history?
It seems not. Another CNN piece found a school teacher to say “We’re not expecting power for a really long time. I don’t think anyone expected this to happen because we don’t have stuff like this in Asheville.” And its mayor babbled “This is an unprecedented, catastrophic event.” Uh, except for 1916 and 1940.
Meanwhile the New York Times “Climate Forward” found a regular contributor to say, with a straight face or in this case typeface, that:
“We knew that many of the places that were pummeled by Helene were very vulnerable to extreme weather events. Helene was the third hurricane to hit Florida’s Big Bend region in 13 months. But the tragedy in Asheville, the artsy city that has grown rapidly in recent years, was surprising for many.
Asheville has long been described by some news outlets as a “climate haven,” or a place that’s safer from climate change. It doesn’t experience the wildfires that are common in parts of California or the storm surges that frequently upend life in coastal cities.”
On the other hand it does have this history of hurricane-induced floods. Just saying. (OK, also then sighing “If only they had Google on their computers” and knew how to use it.)
Apparently not even writers for The Economist do anymore. They ran a short piece saying:
“Officials report that flooding across the Southeast has killed about 200 people, more than any mainland tropical storm since Hurricane Katrina in 2005…. Warming temperatures, which let the air hold more moisture, made Helene wetter than hurricanes past.
Experts estimate that 40trn gallons of water fell on the six-state region, enough to fill 60m Olympic-sized swimming pools. Soil made soggy from days of rain before the hurricane probably helped recharge the storm as it made its way inland. Some people in the razed North Carolina towns are ‘climate expats’ who moved from Florida to escape extreme weather. Helene shows that even those far from rising seas are no longer immune.”
Now anyone with the skepticism to avoid playing three-card monte ought surely also to realize that if there was a deadlier storm in 2005 then conditions have not been transformed. And anyone with basic journalistic training ought not to say Helene was “wetter than hurricanes past” without something vaguely reminiscent of evidence.
While if you’re planning to uproot yourself and flee to safety, dramatically changing your life, you might want to check first whether the place you’re going has a history of storm-related disaster.
Actually, speaking of history, we were being a bit cute in the lead-in. The UnHerd author, Malcom Kyeyune, wasn’t banging on about climate change. Indeed he never used the word “climate”.
Instead he was arguing that the widely criticized response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 brought much discredit on George W. Bush and his administration but at least there was some coherent effort at disaster management in that case including even some advance preparation:
“Bush’s response to Katrina was criticised at the time for being lumberingly slow and ineffective. But the relief effort being mounted now is a pale shadow of what was done a mere 19 years ago, and that makes the silence around this disaster even more ominous.”
In his view a major problem is American imperial overstretch, with the military unable to provide helicopters for the relief effort because they’re deployed to various parts of the Middle East. Which is why he compares it to Chernobyl, adding:
“The real reason Chernobyl looms so large in stories about the last days of the Soviet Union was because of all the lying, the governmental incompetence, and the shared sense that the Soviet Union itself was a senile construct that no longer had any real point. A healthy society, one in which people still feel a sense of purpose and common belief, could have endured far worse disasters than Chernobyl.
But by 1986, the Soviet Union was a place where neither the rulers nor the ruled believed the system still had a reason to exist. By the end, talk of socialism, Karl Marx and historical materialism seemed like nothing more than an absurd joke. What happened to Russian Marxism, is now happening to American patriotism.”
If true it’s ominous; he goes on that:
“Contrary to popular belief, Hurricane Helene is not ‘just a storm’, in the same sense that Chernobyl was not ‘just an accident’.
Beyond all the destroyed roads, the flooded towns, the ruined electrical networks and the stranded American families, Helene is also an indication that the US political system, followed by its military, is very close to the point of moral and physical exhaustion.”
If so, it is clear that much needs to be done to combat the dysfunction, profligacy and petty malice in Washington.
But it might also be argued that if trying to impose world peace is beyond even Uncle Sam, then maybe a hugely expensive fixation with imposing world good weather should also be abandoned in favour of forming a more perfect Union
Establishing Justice, insuring domestic Tranquility, providing for the common defence, promoting the general Welfare, and securing the Blessings of Liberty to themselves and their posterity.
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