No, RTD, Hurricane Helene Not Proof of “Climate Change”
By Steve Haner
The Richmond Times-Dispatch no longer has a climate alarmist on staff, so today it fell to one of its liberal political columnists (it still has two of those; they will be the last employees out the door) to blame Hurricane Helene on “climate change.”
It was a terrible storm, no question. But it wasn’t the first terrible storm, and it was no worse than plenty of storms from decades or even a century ago. See for example The [Raleigh] News and Observer front page reporting a very similar storm in Asheville and the rest of North Carolina in 1916. That 1916 storm caused havoc on the entire East Coast, more territory than Helene just did (because it stalled over the mountains).
Michael Paul Williams’ column is quite honest about the history of similar storms, including Camille, that devastated Nelson and Albemarle Counties in 1969 and Agnes that caused major Virginia flooding in 1972. The algorithm that substitutes for human editors at the “newspaper” added after the on-line column a series of photos from Agnes, 52 years ago, when CO2 levels were far lower than they are today.
Yet Williams implies, as has every major media voice in the Climate Alarmist Consortium, that we just need to buy EVs and put solar on our houses, and all will be well. Riiiight. He adds the political angle to blame “voters” who “deny” the obvious truth that climate change is worsening such storms.
It isn’t about the CO2. It never has been. The actual global data below (and only trust the count since satellites began tracking all storms) show no clear trend line. Look below. It doesn’t. That chart ends with 2023, and 2024 is still underway, but predictions of a record year in the Atlantic so far are not panning out. But this one very bad storm is sufficient to feed the narrative that “climate change” is to blame for all bad weather. Were there no storms in 2024, somebody would also spin that as resulting from “climate change.”
Such storms happen, always have and always will, and as more people move to and build more buildings and parking lots in coastal surge zones and 100-year flood plains, creating more impermeable surfaces and structures to be wiped out, the flooding will just get worse. Asheville and the other damaged cities and towns are far more developed today than 108 years ago, which had to add to the water height. Be prepared.
One paragraph in Williams’ column that is 100% true [emphasis added]:
“For years, towns like Asheville had been listed as ‘climate havens’ by some sources, seemingly because its winter climate is less harsh than the rest of the mountains and its summer climate is milder than areas farther east,” said Corey Davis, the assistant state climatologist for North Carolina. “This latest event absolutely exposes the current reality that almost nowhere is safe from extreme weather.”
