Story by Michael Fumento in Forbes magazine. (H/T ECM)

Do greenhouse gases corelate with increases in hurricane frequency?

Here’s the data we have today:

True, both greenhouse gas emissions and levels in the atmosphere are at their highest, but this year had the fewest hurricanes since 1997, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. For the first time since 2006 no hurricanes even made landfall in the U.S.; indeed hurricane activity is at a 30-year low.

Roger Pielke Jr., a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder, wrote a paper to demonstrate that hurricane frequency was independent of greenhouse gas emissions.

Pielke published a report in the prestigious Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society… that analyzed U.S. hurricane damage since 1900. Taking into account tremendous population growth along coastlines, he found no increase. His paper was dutifully ignored by the powers that be.

How did the global warmists at the IPCC respond to Pielke’s paper?

But the so-called Climategate scandal, which illuminated efforts by climate change scientists to squelch opposition viewpoints, has now caught up to one scientist, Kevin Trenberth, who vociferously and influentially demanded that Pielke’s paper be shunned.

Trenberth works in the same town as Pielke and is one of the top researchers on the strongly warmist Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). In a leaked e-mail from two months ago, he admitted to colleagues what he had hidden from the outside world: that there’s been no measurable warming over the past decade.

Yet two years earlier he told Congress that evidence for man-made warming was “unequivocal” and things were “apt to get much worse.” And in 2005 he told the local newspaper that Pielke’s Bulletin article was “shameful” and should be “withdrawn.”

My recommendation is to test everything by watching debates. Unless you hear both sides in a debate, you just can’t have any degree of confidence about what is really true. Be wary of people who say that “the debate is over” or that “everyone agrees” or that “there is no case on the other side”. That’s how people lie. Find the two best people you can on either side and watch them duke it out. A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence.