Civil Defense Perspectives (vol. 39 #5)
Along with heartbreaking death and destruction, Hurricane Helene is bringing a deluge of sensational, fantastical accusations. The usual climate-change alarmists assert that tiny increases in atmospheric CO2 are increasing (or will increase) the number and force of hurricanes. And reputedly right-wing influencers contend that malefactors created or just diverted Helene to western North Carolina in order to kill likely Trump voters, or make it impossible for them to vote. Or even worse, to wipe out opposition to lithium mining in the area and even seize property to be used for mining (https://tinyurl.com/vzp8krbh).
Here are some historical facts:
Records on Hurricanes: Hurricanes are not increasing in number, strength, or size (tinyurl.com/34zydc8d). There is no significant trend in wind speed in hurricanes striking Florida from 1900–2024 (https://tinyurl.com/5cfzdchs).
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) website details many of the worst storms (https://tinyurl.com/378rdnh3). The deadliest weather disaster in U.S. history was the Galveston Hurricane of 1900. Two major hurricanes, Carol and Edna, hit New England within 11 days of each other in 1954. Category 4 Hazel in 1954 with a similar pressure as Helene hit 400 miles from where Helene hit (https://tinyurl.com/ycypj72e). Carla in 1961 covered 75% of the Gulf; Milton and Helene were much smaller (tinyurl.com/mr48mm26).
Nature Steers Hurricanes. The path of a hurricane is determined by many natural forces. It is an art to forecast it, and impossible to control it. The father of the idea that humans can control the weather, writes Joe Bastardi, was Fidel Castro, who accused the U.S. of blocking Hurricane Flora over Cuba in 1963. It’s a Marxist idea. The best we might do is mitigate things by cloud seeding or possibly disrupting the wall of a hurricane.
NC Flooding Is Not Unprecedented. Asheville, NC, flooded in 1940 and 1916. The latter was larger and caused even more damage than Helene (https://tinyurl.com/ybmp5yer).
Lithium Mining
Kings Mountain in western NC was one of the largest lithium producers from 1938 to 1988 when it shuttered after cheaper sources were found in South America. The Department of Defense (DoD) has committed $90 million to revive the mine, and Albemarle Corporation plans to begin operations by 2030. The mine, one of the few known hard rock lithium deposits in the U.S., may contain 5 million tons of lithium, which could last up to 30 years and support manufacturing approximately 1.2 million electric vehicles annually.
Lithium mining has a huge destructive environmental impact. The extraction process uses more than 500,000 liters of water per ton of lithium. Over a year, producing 60,000 tons of lithium requires moving up to 30 million tons of earth, more than the annual amount dug up to produce all coal output of all but seven or eight U.S. states (tinyurl.com/2x9evufr). Topsoil erosion could have increased mudslides precipitated by Helene’s downpours (tinyurl.com/594tc3zw). Local opposition could derail permitting (https://tinyurl.com/zd8bzm5w).
Human-Caused Climate Change
Meteorology student Chris Martz discusses theories about humans controlling the weather, dating back to witch trials (also see 2005 DDP lecture by Sallie Baliunas, https://tinyurl.com/y9tawpzz). The Left cites greenhouse gas emissions. Right-wing influencers assert that the government spawns hurricanes and steers them with cloud seeding or lasers. Martz addresses the former and explains contrails from airplane exhaust, and HAARP. The High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program is a University of Alaska Fairbanks program, which researches the ionosphere. To believe that the government has the technological ability to steer a hurricane, he states, you have to believe that it can overpower a hurricane that produces (5.2)(1019) joules of energy per day, which is more than 10,000 nuclear bombs worth of energy (https://tinyurl.com/mryjz2h8).
The study of weather modification has a long history. Project Cirrus attempted to weaken a hurricane by dumping dry ice into the clouds. Bernard Vonnegut (Kurt Vonnegut’s brother) wrote about it in 1947. It didn’t work, and the hurricane’s sudden turn toward land, even if not caused by the experiment, dampened enthusiasm (https://tinyurl.com/2hyx5kb3).
Cloud seeding has been used in various areas for decades, for example, in the lead-up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Other geoengineering strategies include attempts to increase the earth’s albedo (reflectivity) to “combat climate change.” There are legal and ethical concerns about unintended consequences. What may benefit one area may harm another (tinyurl.com/5b59f8s7).
Hurricanes vs. Anthropogenic Global Warming
While the popular narrative ascribes bad weather to human-caused global warming or “climate change” from human use of hydrocarbon fuels, hurricane expert Joe Bastardi writes that “global hurricane activity can rebut climate exaggeration.”
“It’s the total picture that is the so-called control knob of climate,” he writes—not atmospheric CO2. “The oceans are a great reservoir of energy, and air-sea interaction is the vital link.”
He calls attention to increases in undersea volcanic activity, bringing up heat from the crust of the earth in the very years the global temperature has increased.
“The fact is that temperatures are a poor metric for climate. Water vapor quantified and explained is the best. But since that would explain temperature and open up the argument to the oceans and the natural cause for their warming, agenda-driven people do not want to see that.”
“The climate house is built by the ocean” (https://tinyurl.com/msctt44f).
At the 2009 DDP meeting, William Gray explained how “Climate Change Is Driven by the Ocean—Not Humans” (https://tinyurl.com/56nbdv46).
What to Do
On MSNBC, Bill Nye (“the Science Guy”) said that the way to stop hurricanes was to VOTE—for Kamala Harris (https://tinyurl.com/3rbw77z5). [Her husband Doug Emhoff would profit greatly from NC lithium (tinyurl.com/2sdw6bhj).]
https://twitchy.com/amy-curtis/2024/10/09/bill-nye-vote-for-kamala-to-stop-hurricanes-n2401940
The Power of a Hurricane
The winds of an average hurricane can produce 1.5 trillion watts of power, which is about half of the world’s electrical power generating capacity in a year.
The energy released from the formation of clouds and rain in an average hurricane is the equivalent of 200 times the world’s electrical generating capacity. The majority of a hurricane’s energy is released when water vapor is converted into droplets [AI-generated overview provided by Willie Soon].
Flood Control Blocked
The lesson from Hurricane Helene is not the effect of climate change, but what happens to settlements in Tennessee Valley tributaries under “natural” flooding (i.e., where flood control dams have been rejected), writes Stephen McIntyre.
“In 1933, the Tennessee Valley Authority was given the mandate for flood control in the valley of the Tennessee River and its tributaries…. Whereas floods in the Tennessee were once catastrophic, younger people are mostly unaware of them. The French Broad River (Asheville) is an upstream tributary where flood control dams weren’t constructed due to local opposition.”
In its first 40 years, the TVA built 49 flood control dams, of which 29 were power generating. In the subsequent 50 years, TVA built 0 flood control dams. In the 1980s, it established the Carbon Dioxide Information Centre (CDIAC), which sponsored much influential climate research, including the CRU temperature data (Phil Jones) and Michael Mann’s fellowship (https://tinyurl.com/2daex935).
Developments in Asheville exacerbated flooding. Land fills and buildings in the flood plain and the many bridges across the streams have seriously reduced flood flow capacity. NC lawmakers rejected limits on construction on steep slopes, among other protective rules (https://tinyurl.com/38ecvkkr).
Engineering the Sky
“Global warming is so rampant that some scientists say we should begin altering the stratosphere to block incoming sunlight, even if it jeopardizes rain and crops,” writes Douglas Fox, Scientific American 10/1/23, https://tinyurl.com/yk5uwfb8).
Solar geoengineering, or solar radiation management (SRM)
involves injecting aerosols into the stratosphere to block sunlight. A special airplane can heft 15.7 tons of aerosol to a height of 20 kilometers every flight. Climate researcher Wake Smith envisions 90 to 900 planes flying missions every day by 2100. SRM might, however, cause nightmarish unintended consequences.
Hunga Tonga Eruption
In one of the most remarkable climate events in modern history, underwater volcano Hunga Tonga injected 150,000 tonnes (40 trillion gallons) of superheated water into the atmosphere on Jan 15, 2022. It increased stratospheric water mass by 13%, and the effect will persist for years. Water vapor is the most effective greenhouse gas. It also increased the stratospheric aerosol load 5-fold—a factor of six smaller than from the 1991 eruption of Mt. Pinatubo. Corporate media has largely ignored the event, and scientists report being “baffled” by ocean warming. Could it be that the earth’s molten core—rather than the atmosphere—is warming the water? Dramatically higher water temperatures are found at abyssal depths, where air temperature has little or no effect. Lately, scientists have been discovering hydrothermal vents with temperatures hot enough to melt lead.
“Hysterical corporate media articles about global warming ignore all these facts,” writes Joel Childers. “‘Science’ has only the barest notion of what heats and cools the Earth, and they even refuse to grapple with the evidence they do have. The climate has been changing ever since God created the World. It is the pinnacle of human hubris to believe that we know what the optimal global climate is, or to think we can somehow freeze that optimal climate into place without breaking everything else” (https://tinyurl.com/53×37869).
Our knowledge of the atmosphere is very limited, but Joe Bastardi writes that “our knowledge of the oceans is laughably small compared to the air.”
Climate Change and Mental Health
According to JAMA Insights, the chronic effects of climate change, such as higher temperatures, increased or decreased precipitation, and claimed sea level rise, can impair mental health, with disparate impact on disadvantaged communities. Clinicians might incorporate the Climate Change Anxiety Scale into their practices (JAMA 5/28/24). The article has no comment on climate-doom-saturated media messages.
The New Yorker asks: “If the goal is to insure that the planet remains habitable, what is the right degree of panic, and how do you bear it?” It discusses “What to Do with Climate Emotions,” and notes that the Climate Psychiatry Alliance lists more than 300 climate-aware therapists (https://tinyurl.com/27wresx8).
Today, “only” 75% of young persons (age 16-25) in 10 countries report finding the future frightening because of climate change (The Energy Advocate, March 2024).
Climate Litigation Soars
More than 3,240 climate cases have been filed since 1986 in 51 countries, two-thirds since the 2015 Paris climate agreement. In its 2022 report (go.nature.com/3szixnv), the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) acknowledged that litigation causes an “increase in a country’s overall ambition to tackle climate change” (Nature 4/25/24).
A pivotal case was brought against the Dutch government in 2013 by Urgenda Foundation. The court ordered the government to reduce the country’s greenhouse gas emissions by at least 25% compared to 1990 by 2020. The government met that target and passed a law in 2021 phasing out all coal-fired electricity by 2030. After Greenpeace won a case in Germany, the government moved its goal to reach “climate neutrality” to 2045 (ibid.).
Dutch farmer have pushed back against measures that would shut down their farms and slaughter 30% of their livestock (https://tinyurl.com/3zzdfnkr).
♦ ♦ ♦
“Nobody’s honest. Scientists are not honest. And people usually believe that they are. That makes it worse. By honest I don’t mean that you only tell what’s true. But you make clear the entire situation. You make clear all the information that is required for somebody else who is intelligent to make up their mind.”
Richard Feynman, “The Unscientific Age” in The Meaning of It All.