There is no climate emergency

OPINION:

It’s hurricane season, and as predictable as the sunrise, the Gaia worshippers on the political left prove that they just can’t help themselves. They are brainwashed and incapable of rational thought.

Vice President Kamala Harris and her lemmings in the mainstream media are running around like Chicken Little, screaming: “Climate change! Climate change! We only have 10 years to save the planet!”

Is any of this hysteria justified? Well, let’s follow the advice of those who fancy themselves our intellectual superiors — those who call the good people of heartland America mindless rubes and a basket of deplorables — and move beyond the emotions and the politics and “trust the science.”

Let’s start with the historical record for North Carolina. If you look at the longitudinal data, you might be surprised to find that the recent events associated with Hurricane Helene are not unprecedented.

For example, on July 16, 1916, Asheville was submerged beneath several feet of floodwater, similar to what we see today. It seems that the 1916 Charleston hurricane dumped more than 22 inches of rain over western North Carolina in a 24-hour period.

Was this because of climate change, or was it something else? Maybe something that we used to call weather before the Democrats realized they could potentially control an entire population if they could scare the masses into compliance by getting them to believe a 100-year flood is an “act of man” rather than an “act of God”?

Then there are the claims that this summer and fall are the hottest on record in U.S. history. Is this true? Did you know that many of America’s highest October temperatures took place in the late 1800s and early 1900s and not 2024?

New Hampshire, for example, set its record in 1879 at 117 degrees. Illinois, Iowa and Michigan hit their all-time highs in 1897. Massachusetts, North Dakota, South Dakota and Wyoming recorded their highest October temperatures in 1920.

Was this all because of too many people driving SUVs? Was it because too many were using natural gas stoves? Did Americans have too many air conditioners in the late 1800s? Was that the cause of record temperatures over 100 years ago?

And what about these hurricanes in Florida? Surely all this is because of too many cars, too many cows passing gas and too much carbon dioxide, right?

Well, isn’t it interesting that the most powerful storm ever to hit the Sunshine State since the 1850s occurred on Labor Day 1935? It wiped out the Keys and left devastation statewide. To this day, Floridians have never seen anything like it.

The Labor Day hurricane, as measured by millibars and barometric pressure (the scientific way to measure such things, in case your Democratic friends want to know), remains head and shoulders more powerful than any hurricane in Florida history. And the most deadly hurricane Florida has ever had was in 1928. It was the Okeechobee hurricane, which killed over 4,000 people. Even Hurricane Ian two years ago wasn’t close to that.

As Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said this past week when a reporter asked him the quintessentially stupid question as to whether or not Milton was the result of climate change: “People need to put this into perspective. They try to take things that happen with tropical weather and act like it’s something new. There’s nothing new under the sun. This is something that the state of Florida has dealt with its entire history.”

We’ve all heard over and over from brilliant former bartenders, such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, that we should trust the science. Fine. We all agree that science is a good thing.

But did you know that over 1,600 scientists have recently signed the World Climate Declaration stating that “there is no climate emergency”? They include Nobel laureate John Clauser, who said: “I have read the various IPCC [International Panel on Climate Change] reports and the National Academy reports, and I was appalled as to how sloppy the work was. It was very obvious … it is just bad science.”

Did you ever think that maybe it’s not us rubes and deplorables who are denying the science? Did you ever wonder if those protesting the loudest might be pointing a few fingers back at themselves as they accuse us of their most egregious sin?

C.S. Lewis pegged such gullibility nearly 80 years ago in his book “That Hideous Strength”: “When did you meet a workman who believed the papers? He takes it for granted that they’re all propaganda. … He buys his paper for the football results. … But the educated public, the people who read the high-brow weeklies, don’t need reconditioning. They’re all right already. They’ll believe anything.”

• Everett Piper (dreverettpiper.com, @dreverettpiper), a columnist for The Washington Times, is a former university president and radio host. He is the author of “Not a Daycare: The Devastating Consequences of Abandoning Truth” (Regnery).