Well, you knew this one was coming. A mere 63 seconds past 5:00 p.m. Eastern and the start of CNN’s seven-hours of town halls on “The Climate Crisis,” Situation Room host and supposedly revered journalist Wolf Blitzer opened this monstrosity of an event by falsely blaming Hurricane Dorian’s entire existence and destruction on climate change.
Yes, that’s right. So perhaps CNN’s most famous journalist either doesn’t understand how climatology works by definition or is willfully ignoring reality to assert something in hopes people believe it.
Blitzer began by boasting that “[t]his unprecedented town hall is dedicated to the climate crisis, an issue many voters say it needs to happen now and scientists say that action needs to happen now.”
The CNN host then asserted that Dorian existed because of climate change:
We’re seeing firsthand the effects of climate change as a powerful Atlantic hurricane is sitting right now off the coast of Florida. It could make landfall tomorrow in South Carolina. Tonight, Democratic and independent voters will be asking the questions live here in our audience and also by video and CNN’s chief climate correspondent, Bill Weir, will join in the questioning as well. My colleagues and I will help guide the conversation.
So, can people debate their views on climate change? Absolutely! But the fact of the matter was using one singular hurricane (like they did with Harvey) to further one’s political viewpoint doesn’t square with reality. Even if you accept the warming ocean temperatures as contributing to tropical systems gaining strength faster, one wasn’t entitled to this shameful spin.
From 1935 to 2019, there have been 35 known category five hurricanes in the Atlantic with five of those having come in this decade (2010-2019).
Whether it was Galveston hurricanes of 1900 and 1915, the Great Miami Hurricane of 1926, the Lake Okeechobee Hurricane of 1928, Hurricane Camile in 1969, Hurricane Andrew in 1992, and on down to names like Katrina (2005), Sandy (2012), and Harvey (2017), it’s a falsehood to assert that powerful hurricanes are only a recent phenomenon.
And that doesn’t even touch the basic realities of economic and population growth in states along the coast.
Back to Blitzer and his fantasyland, here was his lead-off softball to former HUD Secretary Julian Castro:
This is an important evening for all of us. As you know, scientists already are telling us that we’re seeing the consequences of the climate crisis right now, but we’ll cross what’s seen as a massive tipping point, a massive tipping point if the world warms more than 1.5 degrees Celsius or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit. We’ve already warmed up the planet one degree Celsius since the industrial revolution. We’re now more than halfway there. What would be your first step to address a crisis of this magnitude?
Castro then followed by not only gushing about CNN but following Blitzer by tying Dorian’s entire formation on climate change (click “expand”):
First of all, Wolf, I want to say thank you to you, to CNN for hosting such a historic event for the Democratic presidential nominees on such an important topic. [APPLAUSE] And to all of the folks here in the audience and everybody that’s watching…..What you’ve described is the most existential threat to our country’s future, and the U.N. has told us that we have about 12 years to get this right or the consequences could be catastrophic. You know, we see that now. You mentioned Hurricane Dorian that’s about to make landfall. These hurricanes are happening more frequently and they’re happening with greater intensity. It seems like these floods that they call 500-year floods are happening every other year now, right? We see the Arctic ice caps that are melting, the Amazon on fire, so we don’t need client — climate scientists to tell us what we see with our own eyes, although their report is striking.
Blitzer returned like a reoccurring tornado, introducing Andrew Yang’s 40 minutes of airtime with another fact-free intro linking Dorian and sounding a lot like Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) before bringing in CNN meteorologist Jennifer Gray for an update on Dorian (click “expand”):
