By Matt Rooney
_
Phil Murphy is wrong about quite a bit, Save Jerseyans, but some of his nonsense is harder to take than others…
…like yesterday, when he blamed climate change for Superstorm Sandy.
_
“Every day that we don’t act to reverse the effects of climate change, we fail our future generations,” Murphy opined via his Facebook page. “Superstorm Sandy was a wake-up call. As a dense coastal state with so much at stake, we must do everything in our power to prevent further damage to ourselves and our planet.”
That’s QUITE a stretch. Even for Phil, a man who is confirmed math challenged.
The truth: “For the United States, the trend of all land-falling hurricanes has been falling since 1900, as has that of major hurricanes. In the 51 years from 1915, Florida and the Atlantic coast were hit by 19 major hurricanes. In the 51 years to 2016, just seven. In the last 11 years, only two hurricanes greater than category 3 hit the continental USA — a record low since 1900. From 1915 to 1926, 12 hit,” explained Bjorn Lomborg, director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, in a September 2018 opinion editorial.
Here’s an expanded read from the Heritage Foundation on the subject if you’re interested.
More truth: scientists (not Goldman Sachs social justice warriors) generally don’t believe climate change is creating hurricanes. It is true that some believe climate change might be making hurricanes more intense (notwithstanding what you just read above). Their conclusion is hotly disputed by other scientists.
“It is premature to conclude that human activities — and particularly greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming — have already had a detectable impact on Atlantic hurricane or global tropical cyclone activity,” NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory concluded in a 2017 analysis.
I’m not one of those people who thinks ‘climate change’ is a hoax, Save Jerseyans, although much of the extreme B.S. we hear from the Left is unquestionably based upon “cooked” data and suspect motives. How can it be? The earth’s climate has obviously changed over time. We’ve had subtropical ages, ice ages, and plenty of other climactic variations in between.
What I also believe: it’s less than clear that humans — whose industry is relatively new to the planet — are playing a dominant role relative to naturally occurring forces and cycles including but not limited to El Niño events, sun activity, orbital changes, and even volcanic eruptions (which pump an average of 200 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere on an annual basis). Humans’ estimated annual CO2 output (29 gigatons) pales in comparison to the overall 750 gigatons at play in the overall carbon cycle of the earth.
Should we pretend humans play no role? No. But we don’t need hysteria ginned-up by politicians like Phil Murphy. What we need is a sober analysis of how Americans can be ever-better stewards of our planet without going full-“Green New Deal” and, in so doing, reversing centuries of progress in expanding freedom and prosperity throughout our country and the world as a whole.
_
MATT ROONEY is a practicing New Jersey attorney, regular panelist on ‘Chasing News’ with Bill Spadea, and the founder and blogger-in-chief of Save Jersey.
_
