Hurricane

Irv P., who lives on Long Island, writes:

Been without power since 11 p.m. Saturday night. Using daughter’s computer to catch up. Have no idea when power will return. Long Island Power Authority is non-committal about repairs.

Karl D. writes from upstate New York:

Here upstate is bad. Flooding biblical. Entire towns flooded. I was not allowed home until just now as bridges were unsafe. Some washed away. No power for foreseeable future. Forgive grammar. Writing this from cell phone. Only tech I have left.

LA replies:

I’ve seen some of the footage of the flooding on TV and it’s bad. I don’t think I’ve seen flooding of this extent before in the Northeast. Some of the shots, with cars floating down streets, reminded me of the flooding in Japanese towns after the tidal wave (tsunami) a few months ago.

I may be wrong on this but it’s my impression. If the media had foregone the hysterical, manipulative, nonstop alarmism of impending national catastrophe, which threw everything so far out of perspective, the genuine disasters and hardships that localities and people are facing now would have been seen in their true perspective and importance, rather than in the false perspective of a mere aftermath of a hyped up disaster that didn’t occur. As a result they would have received more concern and sympathy than they are getting. The media’s organized hysteria threw everything out of whack.

UPDATE: Someone who has been watching television tonight tells me that the disastrous flooding in Vermont has gotten comparitively little coverage. That supports my point that the actual disasters are treated with less importance than they deserve, because they are the mere aftermath of the hyped-up national calamity that did not occur.

Kristor writes:

Turns out that the flooded Vermont valley I wrote about in my last—Smokeshire Valley—has just been flooded again. Again, all the bridges have washed out. Again, members of my family are stranded up at the far end of the Valley. We’ll see how long it takes the men of the town to rebuild all the bridges this time.

Auntie Analogue writes:

In my last note to you, I foretold the post-Irene spate of Liberal Chicken Little Global Warming “follow-ups” from Media-Pravda; here’s the first one I came across Monday morning:

Hurricane Irene and Global Warming: A Glimpse of the Future?
by Elizabeth Kolbert

Nowadays, whenever there’s an Irene-like event—a huge storm, a terrible flood, a killer heat wave—the question is raised: was this caused by global warming? The very frequency with which this question is being asked these days should make people take notice, but the answer that comes back is usually squishy enough to allow them to forget about the issue until the next disaster occurs, at which point the process starts all over again. The problem here, as several commentators have pointed out this weekend, is that the question being posed is not the question we should be asking.

The standard answer to the question “Was Irene (or the recent flooding along the Missouri River, or the current record-breaking Texas drought, or [choose your own favorite example]) caused by global warming?” is: No one event can be definitively attributed to climate change (though in some cases, you can get pretty close). Hurricanes fall into the category of “weather,” which is driven partly by large and predictable forces and partly by those that are stochastic, or random.

Then she continues:

How about posing the question this way: Are more events like Irene what you would expect in a warming world? Here the answer is a straightforward “yes.” In fact, experts have been warning for years that New York will become increasingly vulnerable to storm surges and flooding as the planet heats up.

Pity the liberal who wrote and the liberals who gobble uncritically and enthusiastically this sort of tripe don’t trouble themselves to ask the same question about black racist flash mobs.

The concluding snip: “We can comfort ourselves by saying that this particular storm was not necessarily caused by global warming. Or we can acknowledge the truth, which is that we are making the world a more dangerous place and, what’s more, that we know it.”

Such terrible Guilt to be borne! Note that this line of “reasoning” is the same one that claims that U.S. policy is to blame for every instance of Mohammedan “resistance” and jihad slaughter, and that social media and poverty and “hopelessness” (in the Age of the President of Hope-&-Change!) are what enable and provoke raceless “teens” to assemble themselves into flash mobs that have attacked only non-blacks.

The hubris of the Anthropogenic Global Warming fanatics is breathtaking. These are the same liberals who insist on forcing taxpayers to pony up yet more dollars for yet more of the same failed welfare programs that have failed incessantly, painfully to eliminate poverty, ignorance, and crime, yet they believe perfervidly that they have the power to alter the climate of an entire world set in its solar system environment.

Oh. I just looked outside, checked again. The sky’s still up there, still isn’t falling.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 29, 2011 08:50 PM | Send