Fires in the West. Overwhelming hurricanes in the South. The never-ending stream of insanity that is North Korea. It feels like things are coming unraveled. While we shouldn’t make light of the present dangers facing America, it’s important to maintain perspective.
A few weeks of intense nature don’t reverse longstanding trends. Extreme weather is not on the rise, even when some weather records are being broken. If you look long and hard at the data, you’ll see that the presence of these historic storms still isn’t enough to make the alarmists right. Let’s break it down.
Flooding
The Journal of Hydrology published a study August 31 of this year. In that study, it was shown that North American and European flooding averages are in decline. The study did not include 2017’s hurricane season (since it isn’t done yet), but it does have modern data. According to that data, flooding rates since 2010, on a decade-long (or decadal) scale, are the lowest ever recorded.
Overall, floods have been in steady decline since the 60s. Now, Harvey’s record-setting rains are sure to push 2017 above the average, but it won’t be enough to change the long trend. Even with Harvey, 2017 won’t be able to compete with the 90s for overall flooding. This season is clearly an abnormally rough one, but statistical outliers will always exist. The long trends are still overwhelmingly in our favor.
Extreme Weather
A cache of studies compiled by the federal government have looked at all kinds of extreme weather. Even while flooding has been in decline, droughts are currently at a record low for the U.S. On top of that, decadal occurrences of tornadoes, hurricanes and extreme storm events are all substantially lower than they were in the 90s (which were lower than previous decades).
Once again, 2017 will end up as an abnormally destructive year for the decade, but just like the daily fluctuations in the stock market don’t impact your long-term finances, this one rough summer isn’t changing the fact that the U.S. is the safest it’s ever been from extreme weather.
Forest Fires
Alarmists also love touting that forest fires will increase with global temperatures. This is a silly notion since warmer air carries more moisture and can actually prevent fires, but this is the one statistic that isn’t completely counter to their predictions. Major forest fires in the U.S. are up, but it’s not the picture they try to paint. Overall instances of wildfire are in fact down. The decline in drought and increase in soil moisture have made the entire continent more resilient against major burns. Despite this, we’ve seen more acres burn in the last 5 years than any previous decade. The reason for this is simple: wildfire fighting policy was changed under Obama.
Up until a few years ago, wildfires were contained as quickly and aggressively as possible. In order to do this, firefighters would cut a path around the existing fire and burn it. This killed potential fuel and kept the fire from continuing to spread. Tree huggers were largely against this principle because their simplistic minds viewed setting fires as bad. Obama appeased them and the practice was abandoned. With the new policy, forest fires have much greater potential to spread beyond control, and that happens pretty much every time a single shrub catches fire.
To put is simply, wildfires are worse because we stopped actively containing them. Perhaps the most ironic part of the whole deal is that these uncontrolled fires dump more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than all of our industries combined. The west coast fires currently burning have already surpassed the country’s annual CO2 emissions.
Bad news leaves an impression, and in a very short span we’ve received a lot of it. Still, none of these disasters are things Americans haven’t faced before. We know how to respond, and we’re being as proactive as possible (or legal in the case of wildfires). We’ll persevere through an unseasonably trying set of events, and in the process we’ll see countless examples of inspiring heroism and life-saving ingenuity.
It is the perseverance through adversity that built our great nation, and adversity will continue to make us stronger. While that’s happening, don’t let current events erase your memory. Extreme weather is still in decline, and the global warming alarmists are still dependent on deception to push their narrative.
~ American Liberty Report
