The Not-So-Record-Breaking ‘Superstorm’ Beryl

Written by Paul Homewood on July 25, 2024. Posted in Current News

You may have read that Hurricane Beryl, which barrelled through the Caribbean last week, was a ‘record-breaking superstorm’. It was no such thing

Indeed, it was no more than the sort of hurricane that has regularly hit the Caribbean since time immemorial.

We have been able to comprehensively monitor Atlantic hurricanes with the help of satellites only for the last 30 years or so.

During that time there have been 21 other Category 5 hurricanes, most much more powerful than Beryl.

Many more, of course, occurred before the satellite era, but were never observed or measured at peak intensity.

Most don’t appreciate that the strongest hurricane-force winds never spread more than a few miles from the center, so the chance of recording them in the past was virtually zero.

Reports suggest that five died in the Caribbean during Beryl. It is a sad fact that people living on these islands have nowhere to go that is safe when a hurricane is on its way.

By contrast, Hurricane Mitch killed more than 11,000 in 1998. And during the Great Hurricane of 1780, 20,000 perished throughout the Lesser Antilles in what was the deadliest Atlantic hurricane in history.

The storm caused heavy losses to the British fleet during a pivotal period in the American War of Independence. Three other hurricanes that year each claimed more than 1,000 lives.

The people of the Caribbean view hurricanes as a natural part of life.

When a hurricane touches down on a Caribbean island the damage is substantial: the ecology is thrown out of its normal cycle, topography shifts, agriculture is set back, the economy and industry take a blow, society either unites or falls apart, infrastructure is ruined, and preventive measures must be implemented.

The only difference now is that we have 24/7 media coverage.

The BBC inevitably led the charge in trying to link Beryl to ‘climate change’.

Maybe they should read what the real hurricane experts have to say on the matter, such as the US NOAA (National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration):

Source: https://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/global-warming-and-hurricanes

Here are the actual numbers of major hurricanes globally:

Source: https://tropical.atmos.colostate.edu/Realtime/index.php?arch&loc=global

But why let inconvenient facts get in the way of a political agenda?

Food prices are up again. Why? Climate change, of course!

Yes, it’s the same old climate scare we get every year! This time it was the Financial Times which claimed that ‘climate change’ was ‘reducing crop yields, squeezing supplies and driving up prices’. 

It went on to report that:

A third of the food price increases in the UK in 2023 was down to climate change, according to the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit think tank.

“There’s a material impact from climate change on global food prices,” says Frederic Neumann, chief Asia economist at HSBC. “It’s easy to shrug off individual events as being isolated, but we’ve just seen such a sequence of abnormal events and disruptions that, of course, add up to climate change impact.”

Such repeated events result in “a permanent impact on the ability to supply food”, argues Neumann. [Increased food prices] once considered temporary are becoming a source of persistent inflationary pressure.

Globally, annual food inflation rates could rise by up to 3.2 percentage points per year within the next decade or so as a result of higher temperatures, according to a recent study by the European Central Bank and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. (bold, links added)

Meanwhile, back in the real world, agricultural output continues to rise year on year:

And cereal production is projected to hit another record high this year:

The authors of this report, the Energy & Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU), are nothing more than a climate lobby group pretending to offer factual analysis.

ECIU was founded by ex-BBC man Richard Black and is well funded by the Green Blob, in particular the notorious European Climate Foundation.

Its board is filled with the usual assortment of quangocrats and others who have done very well out of the climate scare.

Nothing that comes out of this organization can be trusted.

Apparently, this latest scare was triggered by a poor olive harvest in the Mediterranean last year. This was no doubt a calamity for the Islington Set, but hardly a disaster for the rest of us.

The only factor pushing up food prices is the consistently high price of oil and gas, the intended result of the war on ‘fossil fuels’.

This affects the operating costs for farmers, transport and shipping, and the price of fertilizer.

If any of these lies were true, do you honestly believe those same governments would want to rewild large areas of the planet while at the same time trying to destroy their dairy farming industries?

See more here climatechangedispatch

Header image: VOA News

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