When retired Georgia Tech professor Judith Curry penned a blog post on her "Climate Etc." website suggesting that it was scientifically irresponsible to tie the intensity of Hurricanes Harvey and Irma directly to climate change, she probably didn't expect that she might trigger 1,000's of progressives to call for her immediate imprisonment. Unfortunately, for both Curry and society at large, that is exactly what happened.
Here is part of Curry's post that potentially resulted in this latest 'mass-triggering' event:
It is premature to conclude that human activities–and particularly greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming–have already had a detectable impact on Atlantic hurricane or global tropical cyclone activity. That said, human activities may have already caused changes that are not yet detectable due to the small magnitude of the changes or observational limitations, or are not yet confidently modeled (e.g., aerosol effects on regional climate).
As the Washington Times notes, Curry's comments only served to further enrage Al Gore's climate change crusaders who promptly ramped up their calls to imprison anyone with the audacity to present any data and/or question, in any way, climate models which should be accepted as proven fact...even though they're subjective and highly sensitive any number of input variables.
That is the kind of talk that could get policymakers who heed her research hauled before the justice system, if some of those in the climate change movement have their way.
“Climate change denial should be a crime,” declared the Sept. 1 headline in the Outline. Mark Hertsgaard argued in a Sept. 7 article in the Nation, titled “Climate Denialism Is Literally Killing Us,” that “murder is murder” and “we should punish it as such.”
The suggestion that those who run afoul of the climate change consensus, in particular government officials, should face charges comes with temperatures flaring over the link between hurricanes and greenhouse gas emissions.
“In the wake of Harvey, it’s time to treat science denial as gross negligence — and hold those who do the denying accountable,” said the subhead in the Outline article, written by Brian Merchant.
Brad Johnson, executive director of Climate Hawks Vote, posted last week on Twitter a set of “climate disaster response rules,” the third of which was to “put officials who reject science in jail.”
And while we're not sure if imprisonment is the right punishment, it does seem a bit outrageous for a Georgia Tech climate scientist to challenge the opinions of both the Pope and Sir Richard Branson on climate change...who does she think she is?
Meanwhile, Pope Francis said the two Category 4 storms offer proof of catastrophic climate change, even though they are the first two major hurricanes to make landfall on the U.S. mainland in 12 years.
“You can see the effects of climate change with your own eyes, and scientists tell us clearly the way forward,” said the pontiff, adding that leaders have a “moral responsibility” to take action.
“Man-made climate change is contributing to increasingly strong hurricanes causing unprecedented damage,” Mr. Branson said in a Friday statement. “The whole world should be scrambling to get on top of the climate change issue before it is too late for this generation, let alone the generations to come.”
Of course, while we would never question the opinions of the Pope and/or a Knight, we do find the following chart on U.S. hurricane strikes by decade to be somewhat perplexing. Why, for example, were U.S. hurricane strikes above average for almost every decade between 1870 and 1950 before declining in the 1950s through 2000? If hurricane frequency can suddenly be linked directly to climate change in 2017, shouldn't it have produced similarly alarming hurricanes in the 80's, 90's and 2000's? If we're not mistaken, CO2 output has pretty much consistently risen since man first started building fires...
Of course, maybe the extreme weather events have simply shifted away from the U.S. and global hurricane strikes are the more relevant metric...except not...
Oh well, we probably just don't understand the math...