Here’s the interview of the left-wing site Democracy Now.
Excerpt:
AMY GOODMAN: You have a climate cabinet—you’re unusual in this way, Governor Shumlin—in Vermont, dealing with the issue of climate change. Can you talk about something that the networks, as they covered what wasn’t happening in New York and then came very late to what is happening in Vermont, have not talked about through this massive coverage, and that is those two words, “climate change” or “global warming”?
GOV. PETER SHUMLIN: Well, you know, I find it extraordinary that so many political leaders won’t actually talk about the relationship between climate change, fossil fuels, our continuing irrational exuberance about burning fossil fuels, in light of these storm patterns that we’ve been experiencing. Listen, since I’ve been sworn in as governor just seven months ago, I have dealt with—this is the second major disaster as a result of storms. We had storms this spring that flooded our downtowns and put us through many of the same exercises that we’re going through right now. We didn’t used to get weather patterns like this in Vermont. We didn’t get tropical storms. We didn’t get flash flooding. It wasn’t—you know, our storm patterns weren’t like Costa Rica; they were like Vermont.
And the point is, we in the colder states are going to see the results of climate change first. We are. Myself, Premier Charest up in Quebec, Governor Cuomo over in New York, we understand that the flooding and the extraordinary weather patterns that we’re seeing are a result of our burnings of fossil fuel. We’ve got to get off fossil fuels as quickly as we know how, to make this planet livable for our children and our grandchildren. And I do think that there’s a relationship between the storms that we’ve been getting here in Vermont and the example, frankly, of what—they are an example of what lies ahead for us.
Yes, it’s politicians like this that cause oil prices to go through the roof because they refuse to develop domestic sources of energy. And when you raise the price of oil and gas, you raise the prices of food, and anything else that needs to be transported.
But I digress… is the Vermont governor right about tropical storms never happening in Vermont? Let’s see.
Excerpt:
1927 November – A tropical storm spawned torrential rains as it rose over the Green Mountain in Vermont, Nov. 3-4. The record flooding caused $40 million in damage and killed 84 people in Vermont and 1 in Rhode Island. The storm ended as snow in the mountains. Note that this flood was unrelated to the 1927 Mississippi Flood.
1938 September – New England Hurricane of 1938 – Strong Category 3. Wind gusts reached Category 5 strength in eastern Connecticut, Rhode Island and southern Massachusetts west of Buzzards Bay and Cape Cod. The anemometer at the Blue Hill Observatory registered a peak wind gust of 186 m.p.h. before the instrument broke. The hurricane lost strength as it tracked into interior areas of New England, but it is believed to have been at Category 2 intensity as it crossed into Vermont and at minimal Category 1 intensity as it tracked into Quebec. The storm killed over 600 people and is considered to be the worst hurricane to strike New England in modern times.
Ooops!They’ve had hurricanes in Vermont… and those are much worse than tropical storms.
But what about scientists… what do pro-global warming scientists think of the link between hurricane frequency and global warming?
Excerpt:
Ever since Hurricane Katrina in 2005, hurricanes have often been seen as a symbol of global warming’s wrath. Many climate change experts have tied the rise of hurricanes in recent years to global warming and hotter waters that fuel them.
Another group of experts say there is no link. They attribute the recent increase to a natural multi-decade cycle.
What makes this study different is Knutson, a meteorologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s fluid dynamics lab in Princeton, N.J.
He has warned about the harmful effects of climate change and has even complained in the past about being censored by the Bush administration on studies on the dangers of global warming.
He said his new study argues “against the notion that we’ve already seen a really dramatic increase in Atlantic hurricane activity resulting from greenhouse warming.”
The study, published online Sunday in the journal Nature Geoscience, predicts that by the end of the century the number of hurricanes in the Atlantic will fall by 18 percent. The number of hurricanes making landfall in the United States and its neighbors will drop by 30 percent because of wind factors. The biggest storms – those with winds of more than 110 mph – would only decrease in frequency by 8 percent.
So what are we to make over the media freaking out over hurricane tropical storm Irene?
As Dennis Prager argues, meteorologists can’t even predict the intensity of a “hurricane” one day before the event, but they are certain about their predictions for catastrophic global warming. Is that not “irrational exuberance”? I can see why politicians on the left would sign on to this – they are always trying to make everyone equal by limiting individual freedoms and regulating businesses.
WINTERY KNIGHT 