Throwback Thursday #5 – failed global warming driven hurricane predictions 10 years after Katrina

Oh the mighty media quoting the mighty scientists…have fallen flat on their face. Here’s a collection of failed predictions in the wake of Hurricane Katrina:

In 2006, CBS’s Hannah Storm Claims Katrina-like Storms Will Happen ‘All Along Our Atlantic and Gulf Coastlines.’ Just five days before Hurricane Katrina’s one year anniversary, CBS news anchor Hannah Storm featured climate alarmist Mike Tidwell on The Early Show to discuss his book, “The Ravaging Tide.” “I think the biggest lesson from Katrina a year later is that those same ingredients, you know, a city below sea level hit by a major hurricane, will be replicated by global warming all along our Atlantic and Gulf Coast lines,” Tidwell said on August 24, 2006. Tidwell then went on to claim that cities all along the coast would be underwater due to increased hurricane activity and intensity “unless we stop global warming.” In a 2009 Washington Post op-ed, Tidwell explained just how far he thought people should go to “stop global warming.” After comparing the current global warming problem to the civil rights movement of the 1960s, he insisted that “After years of delay and denial and green half-measures, we must legislate a stop to the burning of coal, oil and natural gas.”

‘No End In Sight’ For Big Hurricanes, CBS Says Less than a month after Katrina made landfall, CBS anchor Russ Mitchell predicted that there would be “continued high levels of hurricane activity and high levels of hurricane landfalls for the next decade or perhaps even longer.” “For years now, experts have been saying we’ve entered a period of increased hurricane activity that may last a long time.” Mitchell said on the Sept. 22, 2005 Early Show. Later in the broadcast he added, “since 1990, the number of big hurricanes in the Gulf is up again, and there’s no end in sight.” Now, a decade later that prediction looks laughable since there hasn’t been a major hurricane (Category 3 or higher) to make landfall since October of 2005, when Hurricane Wilma struck Florida.

NBC Blames Global Warming for Stronger Hurricanes, Says It’s ‘A Trend That’s Likely To Continue’ In the weeks following Katrina, NBC turned to global warming as the hurricane’s cause. On September 18, 2005, Nightly News anchor John Seigenthaler said, “scientists studying the earth’s climate say we are experiencing stronger hurricanes in this century, a trend that’s likely to continue.” NBC’s chief science correspondent Robert Bazell continued, asking: “Was Katrina a warning of more terrible hurricanes in the next few years?” Bazell admitted “one storm cannot prove anything about climate change,” but claimed the projected ocean temperature rise would cause more severe storms through the end of the century. That NBC report included climatologist Stephen Schneider who said, “humans won’t make the storms, but we can make them a little stronger than they otherwise would have been.”

Looking back, it’s easy to see how wrong the networks were. In 2008, The National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) responded to climate change assumptions about hurricanes saying, “There is nothing in the U.S. hurricane damage record that indicates global warming has caused a significant increase in destruction along our coasts.” As the years passed, the more obvious it was that fewer major hurricanes were hitting land. In April 2015, the American Geophysical Union reported that the United States has been in a nine year Atlantic hurricane landfall drought. A record low. AGU said, “Such a remarkable ‘hurricane drought’ has never been seen before – since records began in 1851 … the last major hurricane – of Category 3 or higher – to make landfall in the U.S. was Hurricane Wilma in 2005.” Research by meteorologists Anthony Watts and Ryan Maue, and environmental studies professor Roger Pielke, Jr. showed the same hurricane drought and an overall slump in tropical cyclone activity throughout the world. Chris Landsea, who is the Science and Operations Officer for the National Hurricane Center at NOAA, tweeted skeptically about a hurricane/climate change link in May 2015:

How is it that the White House links changes in hurricanes today to global warming when WMO, NOAA, and IPCC cannot? http://t.co/J2Smh1cJxV

— Chris Landsea (@ChrisLandsea) May 30, 2015

– See more at: http://newsbusters.org/blogs/business/alatheia-larsen/2015/08/26/katrina-anniversary-medias-10-most-outlandish-hurricane#sthash.seTHd7IP.dpuf

The reality is this:

And the number is still growing.

Throwback Thursday” is a regular WUWT feature highlighting past claims of climate doom made by scientists, pundits, and alarmist activists…that have not come true. It’s a bit of a take off from the “Throwback Thursday” on Facebook, where people post old pictures from their past, except here, it’s not just the age, it’s the fact that these lousy predictions really do deserve to be “thrown back” into the faces of the people that made them.