But category 2, we didn’t suffer any structural damage to the house or anything, and few people do, other than trees fell, but a category 4, that I say, “Monster.” And it really doesn’t matter where it actually hits because within 200 miles either side of it, 150, there’s going to sheer devastation. So anyway, there is a story today debunking — because a lot of people are out there talking about how we are causing these by virtue of global warming and of course global warming is manmade and so these hurricanes are our fault. Well, there’s a story today by George Taylor that is at Tech Central Station entitled, “I Could See This One Coming. — The other day a lady in my department saw me and said, ‘Well, George, with all these hurricanes it’s pretty clear that global warming is happening, right?’ I think Jane was just being playful, because she’s heard me talk about global warming and knows of my ‘politically incorrect’ viewpoint on this issue–” Meaning he doesn’t believe it. “Yet she raises a question that a lot of people have been asking: does the busy hurricane year in the Atlantic have anything to do with global warming? The short answer: no. The long answer: Long-term statistics on hurricanes are quite good, so we can have some confidence in the trends we see in hurricane counts. There are two reasons for this: (1) hurricanes are big, powerful storms and very hard to miss; (2) they are well-defined. The Saffir-Simpson scale uses wind speed (one-minute average) to define a hurricane’s strength, starting at 74 mph (Category 1) and ending at speeds above 155 mph (Category 5). Other rating systems use central pressure as a criterion.”
Now, figure 1 here. They’ve got a figure here. I’ll show you on the Dittocam. See it? Held it up for two seconds. See it? It’s a list of U.S. hurricane strikes by decade, 1900 to 1999, and it rates them by strong category 3 to 5 or very strong, category 4 to 5 or all hurricanes. And if you look at this graph you will clearly see that from the decade of the forties we are in a decline in not only the number of hurricanes, but the biggies. We’re in a decline and so here’s how he writes about this:
“Figure 1, obtained from data provided by the National Hurricane Center, shows hurricane strikes (landfalls) by decade in the U.S. since 1900. The 1940s were rather busy, the 70s the quietest, and the 1990s pretty close to the long-term average. A simple linear fit suggests a decrease over time. This is a result echoed by Easterling, et al (2000), who said, ‘the number of intense and landfalling Atlantic hurricanes has declined.’ In the Gulf of Mexico there is ‘no sign of an increase in hurricane frequency or intensity,’ according to Bove, et al (1998). For the North Atlantic as a whole, according to the United Nations Environment Programme of the World Meteorological Organization, ‘Reliable data ? since the 1940s indicate that the peak strength of the strongest hurricanes has not changed, and the mean maximum intensity of all hurricanes has decreased.'”
So you see, hurricanes are less mean than they have been. I know, I just couldn’t help it. But, I mean, it’s all a myth that severe weather is getting worse.
(Doing impression of a global warming wacko) “Hurricanes are getting more powerful! Why, this is horrible!” It’s true that not many hurricanes have hit Florida recently. I mean, ’92 was the last biggie, that was Andrew and that’s been 12 years. So you get three in a month and people say, “Oh, something’s gotta have changed!” and something has changed. You know what’s changed out there, folks? I looked this up because I care. There’s this thing out there called “the Bermuda High,” you know where Bermuda is, out there in the Atlantic, and in the late summer and the fall which is the peak of the hurricane season, the Bermuda high is this high-pressure area, and it can be big or it can be weak. It can be strong or weak, and over the recent years it’s been very weak, and it’s been either nonexistent or it has been easily nudgeable. Thing you gotta know about a high is that the winds around a high pressure go in a clockwise rotation. Around a low-pressure area they go counterclockwise.
When you have a strong Bermuda high on these Cape Verde hurricanes, which are the ones that come off the west coast of Africa. These things form as tropical depressions, tropical storms, they travel across the southern Atlantic; they encounter that high. What’s happened this year, that high is so strong that the normal steering mechanism of west-to-east-moving low-pressure areas which always happens in the U.S. — and they go sometimes equatorial up to the Canadian border — but those generally steer the hurricane north before it gets to the continental U.S. or before it gets to Florida, mostly before it gets to the continental U.S. But if that Bermuda high is real strong the steering mechanism is stopped and there’s no place for the hurricane to go and it gets funneled into the eastern seaboard. And what’s happened this year that Bermuda high is outrageously strong. There’s nothing that can move it. It hasn’t moved. There have not been that many strong weather systems moving west to east and so these hurricanes start out there, make a beeline for Florida, and they hit. 
Now, what’s happened with this one, it started far enough south. Ivan started far enough south and it’s not even getting that much of a northern turn. What’s happening is it’s out of the range of the Bermuda high for right now because it’s out of the Atlantic, it’s out of the gulf, but they expected this thing to turn north and east a lot. It’s not going to turn north and east at all. It’s going to turn north-northwest all the way till it hits the northern gulf and see that is because that high-pressure ridge is just so strong that it’s blocking any turn to the north of these things. And the forecasters are asking, “Well, what’s the Bermuda high going to be like next year?” We have no clue. Well, wait a minute. If there’s global warming causing the Bermuda high, it’s there. It’s not there. It’s like El Ni?o is there and it’s not there. You know, in an El Ni?o year you’ve got fewer hurricanes than ever because that’s the warming of Pacific waters, you know, off of Mexico. What happens, then, you’ve got huge winds that spring up. They flood California with weather systems, but these winds during hurricane season just clip the top right off these hurricanes. It’s called “shear” and they can’t form. The inner circulation can’t start.
I remember the first El Ni?o year I was in Florida, there were no hurricanes. They formed out there and all dissipated. You could see these guys on the Weather Channel all disappointed as every hurricane that formed fizzled into nothing but a tropical depression. They got all depressed because there was no urgency in any of it. It was all because of El Ni?o. But you pay a price. El Ni?o winters in Florida much colder and wetter than normal or colder than seasonable average. Florida, as you know, or California got floods and landslides. You don’t want that, and we’re coming up on an El Ni?o winter, a mild one. So this is not global warming. These are just normal atmospheric meteorological patterns that have long been around before we started producing anything that these wackos say is affecting the climate.
This is from Tech Central Station. We’ll get this story. We’ll put it on the website today. We’ll link to it. You can see what I’m talking about. There’s more to it than this to debunk the myth, but you need to have this because there’s all kinds of people during this time of feverish meteorological activity that want to make you think that humanity, predominantly American technology and progress, is causing all of this, and don’t believe it, folks. It’s not your fault. You just live here.
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