Cross posted to the MRC's NewsBusters blog
While much of the media have been trying to use recent increases in the numbers of hurricanes to scare viewers into supporting regulations cutting fossil fuel use to allegedly control the climate, Fox News on Wednesday took the time to actually inform their viewers that hurricane seasons have been just as bad, and sometimes worse, in the past.
On Tucker Carlson Tonight, fill-in host Brian Kilmeade recalled that President Joe Biden recently spoke of Hurricane Ida as if it were an unprecedented storm that demonstrates the need for more regulations. Kilmeade then informed viewers: "What Joe Biden didn't mention is that since 1945 the number of hurricanes that have made landfall actually declined by more than 30 percent..."
He then turned the floor over to meteorologist Joe Bastardi of WeatherBELL Analytics, and allowed him to recall a number of instances from the first half of the 20th century when there were much worse examples of hurricanes hitting the U.S. than the storms of the last few years:
Since Joe Biden comes from Scranton, Pennsylvania, and lived in the Delaware River Valley, I was wondering if he had any idea what those two hurricanes did within five days of each other. ... Ida was bad, but it was localized over New York City and north Jersey. We had an unbelievable situation in '55, and that was after the hurricane season of '54 that brought us Carol which put Providence underwater; Edna which hit Cape Cod where Barack Obama is.
He went on to not only inform viewers that hurricanes used to hit the Long Island area about every seven years before subsiding for the past several decades, but he also recalled a case in which two hurricanes struck the U.S. on the same day in 1933.
Bastardi -- a global warming skeptic who authored The Weaponization of Weather and the Phony Climate War -- has previously explained that hurricane activity goes through cycles over time which means there are some years or periods when there are more frequent storms or greater intensity, with other periods of less activity.
It is notable that the hurricane landfalls of the last several years is coming after a period of an unusually low number of such storms hitting the U.S. between 2006 and 2015. And, while there were 16 hurricanes that hit the U.S. in the five years from 2016 through 2020, there have been several other such periods over the past 150 years when a similar number of such storms were concentrated over several years.
In fact, if one goes through NOAA's list of hurricanes that have made landfall in the U.S. since the 1850s, there is a clear pattern that sometimes that are many hurricanes within several years of one another, and very few during other periods.
This segment that stands out as informing the public and counteracting the misinformation peddled by most other media outlets was sponsored in part by Golo.com and CrowdStrike. Let them know you appreciate this type of good journalism.
Transcript follows:
Fox News Channel
Tucker Carlson Tonight
September 8, 2021
BRIAN KILMEADE, FILL-IN HOST: All right, Joe Biden is citing Hurricane Ida as evidence that climate change is going to destroy us all.
PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: Climate change poses an existential threat to our lives, to our economy, and the threat is here. It's not going to get any better. (editing jump) The storms are going to get worse and worse and worse, and so, folks, we got to listen to the scientists and the economists and the national security experts. They all tell us this is code red. The nation and the world are in peril.
KILMEADE: Really, they all tell us that? What Joe Biden didn't mention is that since 1945 the number of hurricanes that have made landfall actually declined by more than 30 percent -- but Joe Biden doesn't care. He is using these disasters for political purposes. He says we need to pass his infrastructure bill to stop climate change. He also says we need to end all carbon emissions.
PRESIDENT BIDEN: We are going to deal with climate change and zero net emissions by 2050, by 2020 make sure all our electricity is zero emissions. We're going to be able to do these things, but we've got to move. We've got to move.
KILMEADE: He also added that we no longer call tornadoes "tornadoes." We still do. Joe Bastardi is a meteorologist and author of the book The Weaponization of Weather and the Phony Climate War. Joe, is the Earth in peril? Does everybody agree with that?
JOE BASTARDI, METEOROLOGIST: Well, life has never been better on planet Earth, and that's because we adapt to whatever warming is actually taking place a lot better than if it actually gets a lot colder. But let me just say this, you know, I was with my father, who is a meteorologist, and I was with him Saturday night at a wedding, and he said, "Joe, just mention two names -- Connie and Diane, 1955." And I said, "You know, that's a good idea."
Since Joe Biden comes from Scranton, Pennsylvania, and lived in the Delaware River Valley, I was wondering if he had any idea what those two hurricanes did within five days of each other. They made Ida -- look, Ida was bad, but it was localized over New York City and north Jersey. We had an unbelievable situation in '55, and that was after the hurricane season of '54 that brought us Carol which put Providence underwater; Edna which hit Cape Cod where Barack Obama is.
And then Hazel, 54-55, back on the eastern seaboard, unbelievable. How about 1933? September 4th, 1933, two major hurricanes hitting the United States on the same day. The weather was hard to believe back in the '30s, '40s and '50s.
I'm going to give you another example, folks. If you think it's bad now, let's look at Long Island out to Cape Cod. From 1938 to 1991, hit by a hurricane once every seven years. Since 1991, hasn't been hit by a hurricane once. Even Henri trying to come in from the Atlantic two weeks ago, fell apart trying to do it.
How about wildfires, right? We all hear about how bad wildfires are -- they are a disaster where you get hit, folks. But this year is 86 percent of the average over the past 10 years, acreage burnt, which is 20 percent of 1926 through 1935. Now, Ida, right? Listen, my company is involved with one of the bigger -- I'm going to say their name, they gave me permission -- Orion Holdings, all right, down in Houston. In their base, they have clients from Alaska all the way down to the Caribbean. We had them warned about that Texas freeze six, seven days in advance which was the equivalent of a category 5 weather event.
We had to hunker down for Ida Wednesday when the system wasn't even named. How did we know that? Because we line up the patterns that we see globally -- 1955, the year of Connie and Diane, we had the same kind of tropical activity in the Pacific, same kind of pressure pattern in the Atlantic. What's the moral of this story? These things can be seen -- they've happened before, folks. I'm not going to say they are easy to predict but that is why I have a job.
KILMEADE: I know you're predicting it, but are we causing it? Is it something human beings are doing?
BASTARDI: Let's put it this way, we have something you learned the first year you are a meteorologist, any system that has something foreign introduced to it or excess naturally tries to fight back. So let's just say CO2 is causing some kind of problems. The sun, the oceans, the events, the very design of the system, always try to fight back and at the very least you can't tell what CO2 is doing. You know what weather and climate is Brian? You can take this to the bank, it is nature's eternal search for a balance she cannot attain because of the very design of the system. And so that is what it's all about. It's about questioning the balance.
KILMEADE: You're not denying science, you're saying we have to look at the whole picture now get online because that is not what science is about. Thanks so much.
