By Brittany M. Hughes | October 12, 2016 2:19pm ET
There are a few glaring problems with Clinton’s premise that Hurricane Matthew was actually worse because of “climate change” – the first and most obvious being the question, worse than what? There was no bare-minimum destruction standard for Matthew, or any other hurricane for that matter. It was what it was, and any one of a million different variables could have caused it to turn out differently. This wild assumption of a statement may seek to carry emotional weight to influence voters, but it’s heavily lacking in factual evidence.
But if past hurricanes are the standard by which Clinton and her climate town criers are judging Matthew, it doesn’t take long to deflate that argument, either. As noted meteorologist Anthony Watts points out in his response to Clinton’s comments, Matthew was far from the worst hurricane in history:
…Matthew only spent 6 hours as a category 5 storm, the record was the “Cuba” hurricane in 1932 with 78 hours as a Cat5.
…The worst hurricane ever to hit the USA was The Great Galveston Hurricane in 1900, which killed up to 6000 people, long before CO2 ever became an issue.
Watts also pointed out it’s been 11 years since a category three or higher hurricane or made landfall in the U.S. – something we’ve reported on extensively here at the Media Research Center – along with a handy chart showing that tropical storms and hurricanes pretty much haven’t changed – if anything, they’ve actually decreased – over the last 50 years.
Figure from Dr. Ryan Maue: Last 4-decades of Global Tropical Storm and Hurricane frequency — 12-month running sums. The top time series is the number of TCs that reach at least tropical storm strength (maximum lifetime wind speed exceeds 34-knots). The bottom time series is the number of hurricane strength (64-knots+) TCs.
So when making broad claims about the coming climate apocalypse, perhaps Ms. Clinton should collect a bit of back-up evidence from one of the “97 percent of scientists” who allegedly support the theory, and whose identities remain cloudy to this day.
But then again, this is the politically-motivated climate agenda we’re talking about here: where the threats are made up, and the science don’t matter.
