Hurricanes and Global Warming...

A short while back a whole spate of glamorous celebrities hosted the "Hand in Hand" fundraiser for victims of Hurricanes Harvey and Irma.

It was on multiple channels, and in prime time.  They raised more than $44 Million.  That's nice of them.  The money is sorely needed.  But it would have been even nicer if they would have just showed up, make their spiel, collected the dough and were chauffeured on back to their tony Beverly Hills digs.

But they didn't.

Several of the more aged of them felt that we, undeserving rubes that we are, needed to be educated and enlightened by their wonderful selves about the deleterious effects of human-caused "global warming" (GM), and why it will kill us all if we don't...ummm...do something. Stevie Wonder even chose to share with us that we are "blind" or unintelligent if we fail to see that GM is due to human activity.  Cute.  

Babs Streisand scowled as she wagged her well-manicured finger at us unbelievers, letting us know in no uncertain terms that GM isn't "fake news."  It's real, she told us.  And that we must stop driving our SUVs and living in homes bigger than a shoe box if we don't want to die in a flaming inferno. 

A little guy named Bieber, whoever he is, and a graying gent named Clooney, and a tall Black chick named Beyonce, and a diminutive fellow called Leo, and several others must have felt that it was their God-given duty to bring us toothless "flyover" commoners up to speed on why we should be scared you-know-what-less about GM.  Oh wait, they don't believe in God.

And, of course, Alberto Gore has made hundreds of millions of $s touting GM, telling us that Polar Bears are drowning and the Arctic ice cap is melting and that Miami will be under 20 feet of water by...2005...if we don't heed his sonorous, preacherly warnings.  All this while living in a 20,000 square foot mansion in Nashville, consuming more than 25 times the electricity every month than the average family, and flitting around on a tired Gulfstream 2, the very noisiest and dirtiest of all the uber-expensive private jets.  So there.

Of course, Miami's still above sea level and Polar Bears can swim for 60 miles looking for a seal snack and the ice cap is right where it ought to be, thank you very much.  Has Al apologized for his incorrect predictions?

Ummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm, no!  He just released a follow-up docudrama that doubles down on his earlier predictions and excoriates us double-digit I.Q. dummies to get with the program before it's too late.

They all seem to believe that the two bigass storms that just hit, Harvey and Irma, are ironclad evidence that GM is reeeeeeeel, and that no one, anywhere, should be permitted to deny its existence.  It was just reported that Canada will start to prosecute those who publicly deny GM.  Those damn climate deniers!  The Brits are considering doing the same. It's become a sort of religion among the Liberal elite.  Of course, since they have no other religion, it's nice that they finally found something to believe in, right?  Druidism is looking for converts, so our aging stars should really look into that. Famed climate Scientist Jennifer Lawrence just stated that these storms were the result of Mother Nature punishing us 'Muricans for having voted for D. J. Trump.  

Don't you wonder why these elite celebrities make such a point out of routinely insulting half of their potential fans? Doesn't that prove that they're all dumber than a bag of rocks?

Sooooo, dear friends and loyal readers, The Chuckmeister, your faithful scribe without portfolio, decided to look into the matter a bit further.  Not that I'm unwilling to take the word of poorly-educated folks who pretend to be somebody else for a living, mind you.  I mean, they make millions because they can sing and dance and memorize lines to be puked forth on cue (action!), so surely their words can be taken to the bank, right? But hey, I'm just one of those people who need a second opinion, doncha' know.

So here, kiddies, is the straight scoop:  There have been a grand total of 293 named hurricanes that have made landfall on the Continental United States since 1887. That's the year we started keeping tabs on such things, so that's where we begin our data gathering.  

And, for those who point at Harvey and Irma as proof that GM is going to roast us all in a fiery Hell, there have been a total of  75 years in the intervening period in which five or more hurricanes have reared their ugly heads.  In eleven of those years there were ten or more.  Ten!  So two in any one year isn't unusual.  In fact, the only reason these two were notable is because they scored direct hits with above Cat 3 ratings when they made landfall, and happened to cause significant damage. 

In fact, with exception of Hurricane Sandy in 2012, which ripped New York's Rockaway peninsula to shreds, only smallish Cat 1 storms have made landfall since Katrina unloaded on New Orleans back in 2005. So, with apologies to S. Wonder and B. Streisand and L. DeCaprio and Beyonce, and all their really special little friends, no, there hasn't been a "rash" of GM-caused hurricanes unloading on us poor guilty humans.  

In fact, let me remind the reader that back in 1975 the magazine Newsweek ran a blaring headline on its cover, stating, "Are we ready for the coming Ice Age?"  Perhaps they hadn't yet discovered back then that they could made a big bunch of dough by shaming the public into rolling over for a big tax increase in order to forestall a fiery Hell.

So far, Irma has killed a total of 11 people, and 8 of those were in an old-age home in Hollywood Hills, Florida, victims of presumed criminal activity.  Contrast that factoid with the hurricane that hit Galveston, TX in 1900.  A total of 8,000 perished in that storm.

By the way, since the Galveston tragedy, and up until the recent day, there was no such thing as global warming before Katrina hit.  It had not yet been "invented" by Leftists who figured out that they could use fear (the sky is falling!) to wrest a bunch more tax money out of gullible 'Muricans' pockets by using it as a lever.

Think Jerry "Moonbeam" Brown, Guv of Taxifornia, if you need proof. Old Jer is a big believer in GM.  So much so that he's spearheaded "cap and trade" legislation in the once-Golden State to "fix it."  He seems to believe that there's a 60,000 high Plexiglas wall enclosing CA, preventing the smog and soot and dirt in China's and India's air from polluting our air.  He's obviously unaware that what's in the atmosphere in China today will be here in a week.  So he makes it even tougher to start and business or earn a living here due to onerous additional - and unnecessary - taxation.

So, let's summarize.  Whether you want to call it Global Warming (the globe is NOT warming!), or Climate Change (it's always changing!), or Climate Chaos (the only chaos I can see is among this bunch of flim-flam artists who are trying to figure out what to call it next!).

One Mr. John Coleman, Co-Founder of Weather Channel, tells us that we're dumbass fools if we buy into this nonsense.  I'm not, are you?