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Media & Environmentalists Exploiting Recent Violent Weather  A rant by: Rigel If I or my family or friends had suffered injuries or experienced damaged property as a result of this weekend's tornadoes, I'd undoubtedly be singing a somewhat different tune; but whenever some extreme weather events occur, the media and environmentalists can never get enough mileage out of them. Granted tornadoes, hurricanes, blizzards,and thunderstorms shouldn't be taken lightly, but the ones we just experienced caused no loss of life. Sure there was property damage; yet this is almost guaranteed when these types of storms hit any populated areas. The fact is that the recent ones were small potatoes compared with the real big ones. The worst tornado in US and probably N. American history occurred in 1925 when a huge storm swept across Missouri, Illinois and Indiana killing 695 people and destroying 15,000 homes. The worst hurricane was the Galveston, Texas one in 1900. It killed at least 7000 and because of inconsistent population recordkeeping at the time, the actual number might well have been as high as 12.000. In Canada, the most devastating storm was the 1873 cyclone (actually a hurricane) that struck Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia leaving around 500 fatalities. Note the dates of these events. All occurred long before the enviro-alarmists were constantly reminding us of human-induced climate change. What kind of human activities triggered these storms? North America's population was only about one-third of the current figures, and industrial activity here and worldwide nowhere near what it is now. Naturally we have to take precautions whenever conditions are favorable for violent weather; however, we have to realize the media will never miss the chance to milk dry any associated stories, while the eco-chondriacs can hardly wait for such storms so they can wag their fingers at us and exhort us to use public transit and buy more fluorescent light bulbs. << Back Add a Comment Comments ( Add a Comment ) Rigel says: 2007-06-26 20:19:12 I just heard some member of the local Greenpeace chapter state that if Manitoba wants to fight climate change, it should adopt higher electricity prices to convince people to conserve energy and also a carbon tax for industry (which he may not realize will be passed on to consumers). His comments are a reminder of how far removed he is from actual public sentiment because a number of polls both in Canada and the US have shown that citizens are not willing to pay higher energy prices/taxes or make major lifestyle changes so that the unattainable Kyoto targets can be met. Earlier I heard some other environmentalist claiming that we have to take immediate action on climate change; otherwise, the tornados that affected Elie and the Whiteshell will soon be roaring down Portage Ave. One again these guys are revealing how clued-out they are because if they looked to the American areas directly to our south, they'd find they're far more prone to violent storms than southern Manitoba. In fact, the region between central Kansas and northern Texas is known as Tornado Alley because it has more of these weather events than any other place on earth. Yet I don't see any mass exodus from cities like Fargo, Sioux Falls, Omaha, Kansas City, Tulsa, Oklahoma City or Dallas because of extreme weather threats. When I was last there in 2005, I noticed the population and economic activity far exceeded anything in western Canada, including Alberta. The residents have learned to live with the problem just as those on the west coast have learned to take their chances with earthquakes and those on the east and Gulf coasts have to be prepared for hurricanes. It's only the eco-geeks who want everyone to stop driving, forgo vacations, turn the thermostat down in winter and shut it off completely in summer, and use candles instead of lightbulbs. These guys need to spend more time watching Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth and kissing their David Suzuki posters because more and more people are becoming increasingly skeptical of their doomsday scenarios and have stopped listening to their apocalyptic proclamations, especially since the computer models they're using to forecast the future climate are essentially the same as the ones for the daily weather, and we can see how accurate they are beyond three days. |
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Anyone who says that global warming caused this past weekend's storms is a moron. There is no more proof of that than there is that global warming causes my Aunt Min's gout. Too many people are sheep who believe everything the media and a few people with an agenda tell them to believe. To be honest, global warming has just had all the press. But I remember just a couple of decades ago all the environmentalists and experts were talking about global cooling because of the pollution, smog, greenhouse gases which would actually cause the earth to cool because the sun's rays would not be able to properly warm the earth. Those experts today continue to say the same thing, and frankly their data and estimates are no more or less valid. I can't help but notice that most of the record high temperatures I see on a day to day basis are just as often in the late 1800s/very early 1900s or the 1940s. Now and then I'll see a year in the 1990s or the 2000s, but I see enough variance to see for myself that the planet is not super-heating. Yes, there are problems with our environment that need to be fixed. Yes, the world has a finite supply of oil and one day there literally will be no more oil to run today's vehicles. Now is as good of a time as any to start addressing those problems. But in a planned, sustainable way, not in some sort of Chicken Little strategy where we set targets, fail miserably and so we set them even lower, or sooner, and impose heavy fines or penalties. People who claim global warming as the be-all, end-all truth are naive, short-sighted and frankly have a limited ability to think objectively.