Perhaps, in the Headline Hall of Fame, alongside “Headless body in topless bar,” we can add a new entry to display for generations to come. This week a Washington Post editorial declared: “Another hurricane is about to batter our coast. Trump is complicit.”
The point was that hurricanes are caused or intensified by the man-made climate change that we’ve experienced in recent decades, and that Trump ignores that supposedly obvious fact, bringing about destruction. Never mind that, between Wilma in 2005 and Harvey in 2017, no major hurricane (Category 3 or higher) made landfall in the continental United States. That’s the longest such hiatus ever recorded.
Never mind that, according to the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, 40 major hurricanes hit the United States in the 55-year period between 1906 and 1960. In the following 55 years, during the era of global warming, the number was 26. The number in the worst categories, Categories 4 and 5, fell from 12 to 5.
...This isn’t the first time that experts have sounded the alarm about climate change.
In the 17th century, witches in Europe were burned for their role in the climate change that caused crop failures.
An 1895 New York Times article titled, “Geologists Think the World May Be Frozen Up Again” envisioned an Earth encased in “perennial frost and snow.”
In 1932, the Times warned: “NEXT GREAT DELUGE FORECAST BY SCIENCE/Melting Polar Ice Caps to Raise the Level of Seas and Flood the Continent.” The following year, leaders in Syria blamed Western influences for climate change, so they banned the yoyo. Really.
Then it was back to global cooling. Betty Friedan, the future feminist icon, wrote a 1958 Harper’s article, “The Coming Ice Age,” subtitled, “How a rising of the ocean waters may flood most of our port cities within the foreseeable future—and why it will be followed by the growth of a vast glacier which may eventually cover much of Europe and North America.”
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