When the New York area was hit in 2012 by the misnamed Sandy — it was only a Category 2 hurricane when it made landfall in the U.S. and it became known as a "superstorm" for political reasons — we were told that climate change was going to cause more intense and more frequent hurricanes. Since those alarms were sounded, the U.S. has not been hit by a single major hurricane. In fact, we are experiencing the quietest major hurricane period on record. It has been 117 months since a Category 3 or higher storm made landfall in the U.S., says the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. This is the longest gap since the government began keeping track in 1851.
And it's been quite a break. The next longest gap was eight years, and it came between 1860 and 1869.
Much more recently, Al Gore, who would like to take us back to live an 1860s existence, was heard saying that Sandy was a "disturbing sign of things to come." On his website he warned that "we must heed this warning and act quickly to solve the climate crisis."
That was almost two years ago.
Things are not going well for the end-of-the-worlders such as Gore. They've been predicting global warming disaster for decades now, yet the disasters have not materialized.
This is something we reminded readers of just after last Christmas, when we pointed out that "the number of hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts, typhoons, monsoons, earthquakes, floods, freezes and so on is not on the rise, according to the best scientific evidence available."
Things could be even worse for those who've sown fear of global warming if we are indeed headed for a "mini ice age" in the 2030s, as a story that has generated a lot of Internet attention recently is suggesting. They could find themselves huddled over a trash-can fire on some street corner, hoping no one will notice that they are the madmen who just a few years earlier were warning that we were burning ourselves up.
But no one knows what's going to happen in the 2030s. It might be warmer. It might be colder. Could be nothing changes.
What we do know is the models that have predicted warming have been wrong. That alone says more than anything else.
Al Gore, Hurricane Hunter, Huddles By The Trash Can Fire