Guest post by David Middleton
Funny thing… Hurricane Sandy’s unprecedented storm surge was likely surpassed in the New England hurricanes of 1635 and 1638. From 1635 through 1954, New England was hit by at least five hurricanes producing greater than 3 m storm surges in New England. Analysis of sediment cores led to the conclusion “that at least seven hurricanes of intensity sufficient to produce storm surge capable of overtopping the barrier beach (>3 m) at Succotash Marsh have made landfall in southern New England in the past 700 yr.” All seven of those storms occurred prior to 1960.
Even funnier thing… The 1635 and 1638 hurricanes occurred before Al Gore invented global warming…
Even more funny thing… The 1600’s were the coldest century of the last two millennia…
But the funniest thing is that the 1600’s were possibly the coldest century of the Holocene since the 8.2 KYA Cooling Event…
Disclaimer: I’m not implying that Hurricane (AKA post-tropical cyclone) Sandy or its devastating effects on millions of people are funny. I’m only saying that efforts to link this storm to global warming are 
.
References
Geological Society of America Bulletin 113 (6): 714–727.
Moberg, A., D.M. Sonechkin, K. Holmgren, N.M. Datsenko and W. Karlén. 2005.
Highly variable Northern Hemisphere temperatures reconstructed from low- and high-resolution proxy data.
Nature, Vol. 433, No. 7026, pp. 613-617, 10 February 2005.
climatereason says:
November 2, 2012 at 1:35 pm
Gary
Here is the link to the insurance article I mentioned above
http://judithcurry.com/2012/11/01/learning-lessons-from-sandy/
Tonyb
It’s fine to have all kinds of discussions about how to deal with catastrophes, but I was talking about the number of events increasing and they have.
David Middleton says:
November 2, 2012 at 1:54 pm
That’s fossil fuel bull to claim the risks of a catastrope are the same as always.
I’ve posted data from reinsurers, who insure insurance companies that show the risks of catastrophes has increased two and a half times in 30 years, based only on the amount of catastrophic events. Let me explain it! If 30 years ago there were 40 catastrophes, there are 100 now. Since risk is their business, these reinsurers have to calculate the risks without bias to set insurance rates.
Gary Lance,
Correct me if I am wrong, but you sound like a young puppy. As such, you have much to learn.
Property damage is getting increasingly expensive because labor costs are much higher now than in the past. Thus property damage is no good as a proxy for extreme weather events, which have been declining. Read the link above, and get educated. Puppies think they know everything. They don’t. Educate yourself. Start here:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/12/05/new-hurricane-record-2232-days-and-counting-since-major-hurricane-made-landfall-on-the-usa-last-record-was-year-1900
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/09/25/the-amazing-decline-in-deaths-from-extreme-weather-in-an-era-of-global-warming-19002010
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/09/01/hurricane-fatalities-1900–2010-update
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/08/27/hurricane-fatalities-1900–2010-context-in-these-stormy-times
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/05/27/tornadoes-and-global-warming-still-no-linkage
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/10/17/is-climate-change-the-number-one-threat-to-humanity
Also see TonyB’s link above. You have a lot to learn.
Reinsurers aren’t in the science business. They are in the actuarial business.
Using actuarial catastrophe risk analyses you would determine that global warming is so bad, that Frankenstorm caused more property damage than the sum total of the Siberian & Deccan Traps flood basalt eruptions, the Chicxulub impact, the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, every super-volcano eruption in Earth history and every pre-Holocene glacial-interglacial cycle.
I’ve often ridiculed the assertion that the Anthrpocene is distinct from the Holocene. Maybe I was wrong. The Holocene-Anthropocene boundary must be the invention or discovery of property. Since the dawn of the Anthropocene, property damage from natural disasters has escalated geometrically, without any statistical change in the frequency or magnitude of natural disasters.
So long as property values increase and programs like NFIP encourage people to take risks, the risk of catastrophic flood damage will increase. However there is no evidence that climatic extremes are increasing in frequency.
The NOAA CEI has no trend (R-squared = 0.0081). Eight years from 1910-1954 exceeded natural variability and eight years from 1977-2011 exceeded natural variability.
D Böehm says:
November 2, 2012 at 2:40 pm
I posted data on the number of events, not casualties, not damage, not inusrance costs, but the actual number of catastrophic events.
The only agenda a reinsurer has is to accurately calculate risks and that requires knowing the chances of an event happening.
The reinsurers say when they look around the world at geophysical events, like earthquakes, tsunamis or volcanic eruptions, the trends are random, but constant, meaning the risk is what it has been. When the reinsurers look at storms, floods, mass movements or climatologicial events like extreme temperature, droughts and forest fires, they see a rapid increase in the last 30 years. The reinsurers evaluate the trend and say all together both geophysical and otherwise the risk for a catastrophic event is two and a half times what it was 30 years ago.
There is better communication today to discover an event happened and yes there are more people and property to be affected by an event, but it’s also a fact there are more events today than there were 30 years ago. If an event happens somewhere that doesn’t affect anyone or a few people, it’s still an event.
Climate scientist have been saying for years the chances for extreme weather related conditions have increased because of climate change and the fact is it’s been here and not something that will happen in the futrure. Catastophic events have a price associated with them, so whether it’s property damage or causalties, that cost would be 60% less, if those events didn’t happen and these weather related events followed the trend of geophysical events.
So think about what you are doing to your fellow man when you post nonsense claiming their risks of suffering from a catastrophe are the same as they always have been. They aren’t.
David Middleton says:
November 2, 2012 at 3:06 pm
Science is an accumulation of knowledge, but you can’t accumulate the knowledge that I was providing data on the actual number of catastrophic events. It’s a cope out to talk about property damage or any specific event that obviously can’t be proven to be related to global warming on a cause and effect basis. Ignoring the reality that these catastrophic events are two and a half times more likely is not scientific and it’s immoral to use scientific credentials to misinform the public.
It doesn’t make a difference if reinsurers aren’t in the science business. They are people who want to know exactly what the chances are of an event happening, because not only are their profits based on accurately gathering those statistics, but if they don’t do it correctly they can lose money. There is definitely some motivation to gather information on catastrophes, when you can lose your shirt if you don’t do so correctly.
Now, you managed to use the geophysics site to copy and alter that chart, so why can’t you explain how the magnitude of those early storm surges was calculated? Can you explain to me how the barrier beach managed to move and always remain the same height throughout centuries?
The 1821 Norfolk and Long Island hurricane is missing from the list.
“The hurricane produced a storm surge of 13 feet (4 m) in only one hour at Battery Park. Manhattan Island was completely flooded to Canal Street; one hurricane researcher remarked that the storm surge flooding would have been much worse, had the hurricane not struck at low tide.”
Gary Lance opines:
“…think about what you are doing to your fellow man when you post nonsense claiming their risks of suffering from a catastrophe are the same as they always have been. They aren’t.”
No raving alarmist ever considers a cost/benefit analysis when hand-waving about “risks of suffering from a catastrophe”. And my “fellow man” is immensely better off having the benefit of fossil fuel use. The alarmist crowd would happily consign their fellow man to 18th Century drudgery for a trumped-up, evidence-free AGW belief.
There will always be catastrophes, guaranteed. But that is not the issue.
The issue is this: was Sandy an “unprecedented” storm? No, of course not. It was a big storm, but there have been bigger storms, when CO2 was much lower. And since the alarmist clique is the only crowd lining up behind Michael Mann, who mendaciously tried to show that the climate hardly changed before the industrial revolution, they are the ones denying climate change. Skeptics have always know that the climate constantly changes. That is a fact that can be easily verified throughout the WUWT archives.
Therefore, scientific skeptics win the “unprecedented” debate hands down.
D Böehm says:
November 2, 2012 at 3:44 pm
What gives you the right to decide what is best for your fellow man? You don’t stick to the truth to make your case. Those catastrophic events increased by two and a half times over 30 years, but you chose to cover it up and tell your fellow man everything is the same, when it obviously wasn’t.
What are you going to do when worse things start happening and your fellow man has to pay for removing all that extra CO2 in order to get his life back to normal? Maybe your fellow man doesn’t want to pay for New York City and Washington, DC to be moved. Eventually this game of misinformation will end just like the fossil fuel industries will end and given all the money they have made from the start, they will only receive a little more by sticking around. The fossil fuel industries get a little more profit and the world has to pick up their tab. That is the only agenda you serve and you don’t care about your fellow man.
The issue is this: was Sandy an “unprecedented” storm? No, of course not. It was a big storm, but there have been bigger storms, when CO2 was much lower. And since the alarmist clique is the only crowd lining up behind Michael Mann, who mendaciously tried to show that the climate hardly changed before the industrial revolution, they are the ones denying climate change. Skeptics have always know that the climate constantly changes. That is a fact that can be easily verified throughout the WUWT archives.
There are a bunch of stats on Sandy that are unprecedented, but that’s just another thing you have chosen to ignore. You haven’t won a debate about unprecedented by acting like people who can’t fathom facts. If you can’t show a storm in that area of that size, with that pressure and joining a cold front to make snow, then you have lost any debate and have lost your mind for having a debate about it in the first place.
Michael Mann is a paleoclimatologist. If he is gathering data about temperature proxies for the whole planet and you want to play some game that global warming doesn’t exist because there are other times that have been called warm periods, then that’s your problem. You have already stated you agenda and that is to support fossil fuels. That’s what you care about and not paleoclimatology. That’s why you focus on warm periods and cherry pick data to support them. I would like to see the best reconstruction of past global temperatures available to science, but I can only imagine the damage done to good science by the people supporting the fossil fuel agenda. If you people cared about science you wouldn’t be using GISP2 as a proxy for the whole world. Those temperature patterns don’t show up on GRIP and that ice core wasn’t that far away. Scientists are skeptics by nature, but they’re honest skeptics looking for the truth. Scientists don’t deal in misinformation and you do.
David Middleton appears to me as concentrating on Sandy’s storm surge
being not unprecedented in New England.
Meanwhile, I am hearing from that Sandy was unprecedented in NYC.
I do agree with contention that Sandy was no longer a hurricane, but a
Nor-Easter when it hit NYC most badly. Some Nor’Easters have eyes.
And, I am seeing how AGW is not worsening Nor’Easters, including ones
formed from hurricanes. For example, Hazel of 1954 transitioned from a
hurricane to an extratropical cyclone inland before crossing the NC-VA
border, but delivered hurricane-qualifying winds in Toronto and about 70
miles north of Toronto.
I just don’t want data from outside Sandy’s worst impacts to detract from
the unprecidented misery where Sandy was the worst storm to hit since
building a city there.
Berényi Péter says:
November 2, 2012 at 3:40 pm
The 1821 Norfolk and Long Island hurricane is missing from the list.
“The hurricane produced a storm surge of 13 feet (4 m) in only one hour at Battery Park. Manhattan Island was completely flooded to Canal Street; one hurricane researcher remarked that the storm surge flooding would have been much worse, had the hurricane not struck at low tide.”
The list involves Succotash Marsh in RI and Long Island would have protected it. The odd thing about the 1821 hurricane is how it managed to cross so much land and water with little storm surge in the south and had such a large storm surge reported in New Jersey and New York. It’s hard to believe it was even a hurricane at that point. Maybe something about the coast allows for larger than normal storm surges.
“Disclaimer: I’m not implying that Hurricane (AKA post-tropical cyclone) Sandy or its devastating effects on millions of people are funny. I’m only saying that efforts to link this storm to global warming are .”
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I think that the readers understood that.
The greatest potential monetary devastation would be if people in the US vote based on the belief that another couple of windmills or Solyndras would have prevented Sandy.
(PS Fund raising for the relief of the victims is starting. Remember Katrina. Millions that people thought were going to victims went to pay performers, “administrative cost” or just plain disappeared. Before opening your wallet, check out the group raising the funds. It’s probably best to stick with an established charity rather than a new one with “Sandy” in its name.)
D Böehm says:
November 2, 2012 at 2:40 pm
Gary Lance,
Correct me if I am wrong, but you sound like a young puppy. As such, you have much to learn.
Property damage is getting increasingly expensive because labor costs are much higher now than in the past. Thus property damage is no good as a proxy for extreme weather events, which have been declining. Read the link above, and get educated. Puppies think they know everything. They don’t. Educate yourself. Start here: ……
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This reminds of when (I think it was) the movie Titanic broke the box office record set by Gone With The Wind. I saw an article that compared the two movies and, after adjusting for inflation, Gone With The Wind still held the record. And after dividing the box office by ticket price still sold the most tickets.
Let’s say that you had the chance at two identical desk from 1920. But you could only have one. You knew that the original owners had each hidden $200 in their desk. One owner stashed ten $20 bills. The other had stashed ten $20 gold pieces. Which would you choose? In the 1920 you could buy a new car for $260+. Which desk could get you a new car today?
The point is, if you’re going to base the severity of storms based on the dollar value of the damage done, you have to adjust for inflation or you don’t have a true picture. (Of course you also have to adjust for new development of the affected area but that’s another topic.)
The truth will come out. It’s only a ‘click” away.
Gary Lance says:
November 2, 2012 at 5:18 pm
============================================================
Wow.
“Michael Mann is a paleoclimatologist.”
Did you know he’s also a Nobel Laureate?
You even used Michael Mann and “cherry pick data” in the same paragraph yet don’t see the connection.
Did you know that the environmentals have been against fossil fuels since the ’60s for one reason or another. Today the reason is CAGW.
You don’t like fossil fuels. OK. Let’s build more nuclear power plants. Maybe GM should revive it’s attempts to build a nuclear powered car to “save the planet”?
PS Has the globe warmed from rising CO2 in the last 15 or so years like Hansen said it would?
Gunga Din says:
November 2, 2012 at 6:33 pm
Why does it remind you of that, when a reinsurer has only looked at the catastrophes of the last 30 years and has listed events only. There is no adjustment for inflation, because one earthquake is always going to equal one earthquake. Why should geophysical events remain constant but weather related events increase? The risk from a volcano hasn’t changed, but the risk of a drought has.
I provided you with NOAA’s Climate Extremes Index… This shows no statistically significant trend in the frequency of climatic extremes in North America since 1910.
I also provided you with a recent peer-reviewed paper coauthored by Gilbert Compo, of NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory (ESRL)…
Figure 16 from Compo et al., 2011.
According to Compo, “In the climate models, the extremes get more extreme as we move into a doubled CO2 world in 100 years. So we were surprised that none of the three major indices of climate variability that we used show a trend of increased circulation going back to 1871.”
Because the reinsurer and the primary insurers have to approach business from an actuarial standpoint. If you look at the last thirty years of the NOAA CEI, you’ll see an increasing trend. This chart that you posted shows an exponentially increasing trend of weather-related property damage since 1980. North American climatic extremes have increased since 1980 and property values have also increased. As I said in my reply to Mr. Mosher, the future will be “about the same as the past… Provided you actually look at and try to understand the past.” 30-yr trends are not climatologically significant.
I don’t believe it about these storms way back in history. Everyone knows that the climate started in 1975…
And another thing. I saw some learned expert (I use the term loosely) sounding off very loudly on CNN the other day along the lines of ‘Its all getting SOOOO much worse’ – stating that the cost of insurance/rebuilding etc was getting higher and higher.
YES – and THAT’S BECAUSE people live in MORE EXPENSIVE HOUSES, have far more STUFF, which costs MORE MONEY….
Gary
London has had an embankment to protect it since the 1860’s
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thames_Embankment
It served several purposes which included protection against the river and reclaiming former marshland. A rising Thames Barrier was added some 30 years ago that straddles the river but is usually lowered into the river bed
London has suffred some notable floods over the centuries including many in the 17th Century when the first serious efforts were made to protect the city. Storm surges are nothing new and depending on the circumstances-such as the position of the storm and the height of the tide- will cause damage ranging from minor to catastrophic.
As I previously posted observations over the last 1000 years tell us that storms were far worse in the past, indeed fire and storms were some of the reasons the first insurance company in the world-Sun-was set up in 1710. Their plaques can still be seen to this day on walls of some old houses that had bought protection.
We must stop looking at thirty years data in the belief that things are much worse than in the past. New York seems to have been substantially unprotected and authorities everywhere must assume that although we live in a relatively benign period future storms could be as bad as in the past and start planning accordingly. Undoubtedly with more people and increased property values catastrophes, loss of life and increased bills to rectify things are bound to happen .
tonyb
David Middleton says:
November 3, 2012 at 2:28 am
[Content edited to get to the point]
I provided you with NOAA’s Climate Extremes Index… This shows no statistically significant trend in the frequency of climatic extremes in North America since 1910.
The CEI was first introduced in early 1996 (Karl et al. 1996) with the goal of summarizing and presenting a complex set of multivariate and multidimensional climate changes in the United States so that the results could be easily understood and used in policy decisions made by nonspecialists in the field. The contiguous U.S. was selected as the focus for this study in part since climate change is of great interest to U.S. citizens and policy makers and since climate changes within the U.S. have not been given extensive coverage in intergovernmental or national reports which focus on climate change assessments (IPCC 2001; NRC 1992; NRC 2001).
In 2003, two notable modifications were made to the CEI. Indicators in the original CEI summarized trends in temperature, precipitation and drought data on an annual basis. The revised CEI now includes an experimental tropical system component and is calculated for multiple seasons. The newest indicator documents trends in tropical system activity based on the wind velocity of landfalling tropical storm and hurricanes. As of October 2004, CEI calculations begin in 1910 for all periods and are updated within a few weeks after the end of a particular season and include final quality controlled data as well as near-real-time data. In September 2005, the two components for each of four indicators (steps 1, 2, 3, and 5) are plotted separately to help in the identification of trends and variability of each component. All graphs are now plotted as bar graphs rather than dot plots. In December 2005, a year-to-date season was made available along with the other eight standard seasons. Additions and modifications made to the original CEI are explained in an article entitled “A Revised U.S. Climate Extremes Index”, which was published in mid-2008 (Gleason et al. 2008).
In July 2011, a regional CEI (RCEI) was introduced, which computes the CEI acrss the 9 U.S. Standard Regions (Karl and Koss, 1984). Year-to-year varations in the regional index have higher amplitude swings and larger/smaller percentages of each region affected by extremes compared with the CEI. There is a good deal of spatial consistency among the RCEI indicators and similar extremes may span across or be absent from a region in any given season.
Source: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/extremes/cei/
You say the CEI looks for trends in North America and NOAA says they look for trends in the contiguous U.S, so who is right? The Photobucket link you posted says U.S. so you would think that would be a clue or you would go to the NOAA and find out what they use to evaluate their trends. The stats used for CEI aren’t consistent to catastrophic events that people recognize. I gave examples of trends only based on catastropic events and you started saying they weren’t in the science business. Does anyone contact a scientist to ask if those trees burning over there are a forest fire? Do people seeing a wall of water coming at them call up a scientist and ask if that’s a tsunami? Catastrophic events are so common sense they don’t need a scientist to identify them.
David Middleton says:
November 3, 2012 at 2:44 am
Gary Lance says:November 2, 2012 at 7:08 pmGunga Din says:November 2, 2012 at 6:33 pmWhy does it remind you of that, when a reinsurer has only looked at the catastrophes of the last 30 years and has listed events only. There is no adjustment for inflation, because one earthquake is always going to equal one earthquake. Why should geophysical events remain constant but weather related events increase? The risk from a volcano hasn’t changed, but the risk of a drought has.
Because the reinsurer and the primary insurers have to approach business from an actuarial standpoint. If you look at the last thirty years of the NOAA CEI, you’ll see an increasing trend. This chart that you posted shows an exponentially increasing trend of weather-related property damage since 1980. North American climatic extremes have increased since 1980 and property values have also increased. As I said in my reply to Mr. Mosher, the future will be “about the same as the past… Provided you actually look at and try to understand the past.” 30-yr trends are not climatologically significant.
You say:
This chart that you posted shows an exponentially increasing trend of weather-related property damage since 1980.
No, it doesn’t and you have been shown repeatedly that chart only counts catastrophic events. It has nothing to do with paying claims and a reinsurer isn’t involved in paying claims. A reinsurer is involved in insuring an insurance company and is looking for increased risk based on the likelihood of catastrophic events occurring.
Gunga Din says:
November 2, 2012 at 6:57 pm
Gary Lance says:
November 2, 2012 at 5:18 pm
============================================================
Wow.
“Michael Mann is a paleoclimatologist.”
Did you know he’s also a Nobel Laureate?
You even used Michael Mann and “cherry pick data” in the same paragraph yet don’t see the connection.
Did you know that the environmentals have been against fossil fuels since the ’60s for one reason or another. Today the reason is CAGW.
You don’t like fossil fuels. OK. Let’s build more nuclear power plants. Maybe GM should revive it’s attempts to build a nuclear powered car to “save the planet”?
PS Has the globe warmed from rising CO2 in the last 15 or so years like Hansen said it would?
The IPCC was given the Nobel Prize and your focus on Michael Mann is all about your fossil fuel agenda to dismiss present day warming with the MWP or any so-called warming trend you can invent from any proxy. The fact that you people can’t even indentify a period of time for your so-called warming events is proof they are just made up. Michael Mann is involved in the Paleoclimatology of the world and you people keep cherry picking anecdotal evidence that has nothing to do with the world. You’ve invented this pseudo-science based on one Greenland ice core that doesn’t even agree with another ice core a little farther north. The most logical explanation for the fluctuation for GISP2 are changes in the climate patterns and Gulf Stream influencing southern Greenland. The temperatures don’t vary much, but you find a peak and claim it’s the Minoan Warm Period, because you like the word warm. The Minoans didn’t live near Greenland and climate changes in Greenland have no mechanism to influence the Minoans. There is no evidence the Minoan Warm Period existed and isn’t something just made up.
Where is GISP1 and why don’t you people use that data? GISP2 was named because it was the second ice core on the Greenland ice sheet and a little south of GRIP. You don’t use GRIP data, because it doesn’t have the peaks and valleys of GISP2. Your imaginary warm period can go thousands of miles away to become the Minoan Warm Period and be claimed to be global, but it can’t warm a little farther north in Greenland. Your position on Paleoclimatology is agenda driven by the fossil fuel industries. It isn’t science.
Scientists, like Michael Mann, will let the chips fall where they may and use the best proxies available to reconstruct past temperatures for the whole world. The agenda of science is to get to the facts and your agenda is ignore anything that doesn’t support the continued use of fossil fuels.
The science of Paleoclimatology is still in it’s infancy and I’m sure the fossil fuel industries have funded cherry picked projects that will damage the science for decades to come.
You need to go back to school if you want to discuss nuclear energy with me. You obviously don’t know that private money isn’t interested in that dinosaur technology and nuclear energy is the most subsidized energy we’ve ever used. If we would have developed Thorium MSRs like the scientists suggested, we wouldn’t be having these problems and coal would have been shut down years ago. There is a way to make safe nuclear energy that doesn’t generate all that nuclear waste that the taxpayers will eventually get stuck cleaning up. The current design for commerical nuclear reactors is a product of providing materials for nuclear weapons and not designed to make electricity safely. We don’t need the nuclear materials now, so the government isn’t going to subsidize the nuclear industry, like it did in the past.
Johann Carl Friedrich Gauß is not surprised.
Gary Lance says:
“What are you going to do when worse things start happening and your fellow man has to pay for removing all that extra CO2 in order to get his life back to normal?”
Isn’t the puppy amusing? Lance probably even believes that nonsense. And it is nonsense, as proven by the climate Null Hypothesis, which has never been falsified. I don’t think the puppy even understands what the Null Hypothesis means. But regular WUWT readers know that the Null is a corollary of the Scientific Method, and that it falsifies every alternative hypothesis.
That means that there are no climate parameters that have not been exceeded in the past, when CO2 was very low. Everything observed today has happened during the Holocene, and to a greater degree. Thus, the rise in CO2 from 3 molecules in 10,000 to 4 in 10,000 has not resulted in falsifying the Null Hypothesis. In other words, CO2 makes no difference. It is harmless, and beneficial to the biosphere. More is better.
Gary Lance is just a young puppy who pretends that he is up to speed on the subject. But he is not; he makes quick detours to Wikipedia, SkS and other alarmist blogs for his talking points, and then posts long screeds here, which convince absolutely nobody as the comments show. People are generally either irritated or amused by yapping puppies. But they never take them seriously.
D Böehm says:
November 3, 2012 at 9:34 am
Gary Lance says:
“What are you going to do when worse things start happening and your fellow man has to pay for removing all that extra CO2 in order to get his life back to normal?”
Isn’t the puppy amusing? Lance probably even believes that nonsense.
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To be fair, I did learn something from him. It never occured to me before that keeping gas in my gas tank and changing the oil in my car means I have a “fossil fuel agenda”.