Tomorrows Weather Forecast: Politics

A gem from Stacy McCain:

...Sex is political. Food is political. School is political. And, thanks to the global warming scare, even the weather is now political. Except we don’t even call it “weather” anymore. Now it’s called “climate.”

Silly as they seem, these word games are always significant. Until about 1970, for example, people talked about “outdoors” or “nature.” Once the elite started calling it “the environment,” however, you knew it had become political. It was the same way with sex. People used to talk about “homosexuals.” Once the elite decided to use “gay” instead (as random as this choice may have seemed), it was political.

Actually, if I recall correctly, the word we mostly used was "queer", which was meant to be a less toxic euphemism, because the behavior was, well, a little queer.

The change of language from “weather” to “climate” is intended to impress and awe us with the authority of Science. Whereas mere weather is something that anyone can talk about — it’s cool, overcast and windy today — you have to be a scientist to talk about climate. And anyone who doesn’t endorse the Scientific Consensus about global warming is marginalized and demonized as being anti-science...

Which get us to:

Dr. Heidi Cullen (and don’t you dare omit that authoritative “doctor” in front of her name, you science-hating sexist) once suggested that “meteorologists be stripped of their scientific certification if they express skepticism about predictions of man-made catastrophic global warming,” Becca J. Lower reminds us, in explaining how Doctor Cullen smuggled politics into the Philippines typhoon story.

The only problem is that the data do not support any increase in the number or strength of typhoons striking the Philippines in recent years:

From currently available historical TC records, we constructed a long-period global hurricane landfall dataset using a consistent methodology. We have identified considerable interannual variability in the frequency of global hurricane landfalls; but within the resolution of the available data, our evidence does not support the presence of significant long-period global or individual basin linear trends for minor, major, or total hurricanes within the period(s) covered by the available quality data.  Therefore, our long-period analysis does not support claims that increasing TC landfall frequency or landfall intensity has contributed to concomitantly increasing economic losses.