Wikipedia: 2013 Pacific typhoon season summary. Even including super-typhoon Haiyan, 2013 was an average year. image is from commdiginews

Paul Driessen tells it like it is in this Town Hall article (here).  Some excerpts that struck me and some bolding that I added.

No Real-World evidence supports a “dangerous manmade climate change” thesis. In fact, a moderately warmer planet with more atmospheric carbon dioxide would hugely benefit crop, forest and other plant growth, wildlife and humans – with no or minimal climate effect. A colder planet with less CO2 would punish them. And a chillier CO2-deprived planet with less reliable, less affordable energy (from massive wind, solar and biofuel projects) would threaten habitats, species, nutrition and the poorest among us.

And yet, as Hurricane Matthew neared Florida on the very day the Paris climate accord secured enough signatures to bring it into force, politicians, activists and reporters refused to let that crisis go to waste.

Matthew was a powerful storm that left destruction and death in its wake, especially in impoverished Haiti. Its slow track up the southeastern US coastline pummeled the region with rain, flooding and more deaths. But it was a Category 1 hurricane with 75 mph winds when it made landfall in South Carolina October 8, and a post-tropical storm as it moved offshore from North Carolina a day later.

Despite the rain and floods, that makes a record eleven years since a major (Category 3-5) hurricane last made landfall in the United States (Wilma in October 2005). The previous record major hurricane hiatus was nine years, 1860-1869, according to NOAA’s Hurricane Research Division.

Only a charlatan would suggest that this record lull is due to rising atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. But plenty of alarmist charlatans claim that any violent or “unseasonal” storms are due to “too much” CO2.

Just as intolerable, United Nations “humanitarian and disaster relief” agencies were issuing “emergency appeals” for $120 million in “life-saving assistance” funds for the desperate Haitians. This after President Obama improperly diverted $500 million from an economic aid program set up to address disease epidemics – like the Zika and cholera cases that are rapidly rising in Haiti – to the UN’s Climate Action Fund. So Obama and the UN blame hurricanes and diseases on manmade climate change, but refuse to spend money they already have on a hurricane disaster, and instead beg for more money. Incredible!

It is clearly not climate change that threatens the poor. It is policies imposed in the name of preventing climate change that imperil poor, minority, blue-collar, farm and factory families.

The impacts of climate change obsession on developing nations would be far worse, if they bowed to President Obama’s suggestions and agendas. African nations, he has said, should “leapfrog” “dirty” fossil fuels and instead utilize their “bountiful” wind, solar, geothermal and biofuel resources. In practice, that would mean having expensive, intermittent electricity and growing biofuel crops on Africa’s nutrient-depleted, drought-stricken lands, with no fertilizer, mechanized farming equipment or GMO seeds.

That is racist. It reflects an elitist preference that the world’s poor should die, rather than emit carbon dioxide “pollution,” drive cars, build modern homes, or engage in other “unsustainable” practices.

Thankfully, few developing countries are listening to such nonsense. Instead, they are using oil, natural gas and especially coal, in ever-increasing amounts, to lift their people out of abject poverty – because the “climate-saving” Paris non-treaty imposes no restrictions on their use of fossil fuels.

Keeping fossil fuels in the ground really means depriving people of reliable, affordable electricity; prolonging unemployment and poverty; having no feed stocks for plastics and petrochemicals, except what might come from biofuels; and blanketing hundreds of millions of acres of farm, scenic and habitat areas with biofuel crops, 400-foot-tall wind turbines, vast solar arrays and new transmission lines.

When taxpayers, consumers, unemployed workers and poor families finally recognize these inconvenient truths, the world will be a far better place – with true freedom, justice and opportunity for all.

Once again climatism misinforms and misdirects on environmental hazards. Now fears of long-term drought in the US Southwest are put forward and blamed on “climate change”, code for burning fossil fuels. NASA: Megadrought Lasting Decades Is 99% Certain in American Southwest 

Unsurprisingly, when you read past the headlines, you find that the real issue is man-made all right: water and land usage by growing populations of residents in the region.

Much of the Southwest relies on the Colorado River and its tributaries for some or all of its water. Beginning as a trickle seeping out of the ground above 10,000 feet, just west of the Continental Divide, the Colorado feeds critical farmland, public water supplies and helps generate hydroelectric power. Thirty to 40 million people rely on Colorado River water.

Historically, the Colorado emptied into the Gulf of California. Today, what little remains of the Colorado River when it reaches Mexico has been diverted to irrigate the farms of Mexicali Valley. The rest of the river exists mostly as a dry memory.

“The Colorado River is one of the most dammed and diverted rivers on the planet,” said Gary Wockner, executive director of Save The Colorado, in an interview with EcoWatch. “In fact, every drop of its water, over 5 trillion gallons of water per year, is diverted out and the river no longer meets the Gulf of California.”

Climate models are then employed to predict a megadrought for the region resulting from projecting several degrees of global warming.

First of all, even though the US Southwest has seen more temperature rise than other US regions, it is still the case that it is not getting hotter, it is getting milder. That is, daily maximums are trending lower, while overnight lows are rising, resulting in milder winters, earlier springs and later autumns.

But future temperature increases are not the problem, that is misdirection.  The present water shortages are totally man-made, directly resulting from failed management practices and lack of political will and leadership.

“The implications are that the river is already severely depleted and the reservoirs are at near historic lows and all the predictions are that it is going to get worse,” said Wockner. “And so people who manage water supplies need to be managing for less water.”

It is a cop-out to campaign for CO2 reduction agreements and for a cap-and-trade market (casino to replace the subprime mortgage game). Those initiatives will do nothing for water in the region. Forget “fighting climate change” and get on with adapting social and economic policies to suit the water realities that exist already.

The absence of extreme weather is often called “fair weather”, so I’ll use that to describe the record number of days to pass in Florida without a hurricane making landfall anywhere in the state.  With Hermine crossing northern Florida this morning briefly at hurricane strength, the record is now set at 10 years between 2006 and 2016.

The chart shows the number of hurricanes making landfall in Florida in each year, the highest year being 4 such storms in 2004.  It is unprecedented to go a full decade without any hurricanes hitting Florida.  The previous lull was 7 years between 1987 to 1994.  The serious category 4 storms (max winds 125+ miles/hr) are listed below, showing how active was the previous decade.

Summary

The plateau of mild temperatures in this decade coincides with unprecedented fair weather, not extremes as alarmists claim.

The full list of tropical storms striking Florida is available at State Climate Office of North Carolina

Pleasure craft spotted in a marina near Miami.

Recently I posted X-Weathermen are Back on news stories claiming that extreme weather events can be tied to global warming.  As Mike Hulme explained, the methods do not support those attributions.

Now we have a study looking at extreme weather in the past and concluding: Climate data since Vikings cast doubt on more wet, dry extremes.  It seems that our weather today is quite tame by comparison. There are the usual comments assuring readers that this in no way contradicts global warming doctrine.  But the conclusions say otherwise:

Climate records back to Viking times show the 20th century was unexceptional for rainfall and droughts despite assumptions that global warming would trigger more wet and dry extremes, a study showed on Wednesday.

Stretching back 1,200 years, written accounts of climate and data from tree rings, ice cores and marine sediments in the northern hemisphere indicated that variations in the extremes in the 20th century were less than in some past centuries.

“Several other centuries show stronger and more widespread extremes,” lead author Fredrik Ljungqvist of Stockholm University told Reuters of findings published in the journal Nature. “We can’t say it’s more extreme now.”

Ljungqvist said many existing scientific models of climate change over-estimated assumptions that rising temperatures would make dry areas drier and wet areas wetter, with more extreme heatwaves, droughts, downpours and droughts.

The 10th century, when the Vikings were carrying out raids across Europe and the Song dynasty took power in China, was the wettest in the records ahead of the 20th, according to the researchers in Sweden, Germany, Greece and Switzerland.

And the warm 12th century and the cool 15th centuries, for instance, were the driest, according to the report, based on 196 climate records. Variations in the sun’s output were among factors driving natural shifts in the climate in past centuries.

“This paper adds to the growing evidence that the simple paradigm of ‘wet-gets-wetter, dry-gets-drier’ under a warming climate does not apply over land areas,” said Ted Shepherd, a professor at the University of Reading.

For more on how rainfall is distributed across the globe see Here Comes the Rain Again

Rainbow signifying the promise of safety from global flooding