The 2006 Hurricane season ends officially on Thursday, November 30. It will go down as one of the quietest hurricane seasons on record. Good news for coastal residents like myself who faced anxiety or in some cases extreme loss in the previous season. Compare the maps of storm tracks from this year with last year. Quite a remarkable difference.
It wasn't supposed to be this way. Readers may recall that at the beginning of the hurricane season alarmists took to the airwaves to insist that this year could be as bad as the previous year, or worse.
Take a look back at the hurricane forecast from "Accuweather:"
One in Six Americans Could be Directly Impacted by 2006 Hurricane Season
AccuWeather.com Hurricane Center Forecasts Potential Ripple Effect for All Americans
May 15, 2006-The AccuWeather.com Hurricane Center, led by Chief Forecaster Joe Bastardi, today released its 2006 hurricane season forecast. An active hurricane season appears imminent, which could have major repercussions for the U.S. economy and the one in six Americans who live on the Eastern Seaboard or along the western Gulf of Mexico.
For the 2006 Hurricane Season-which traditionally runs from June 1 through November 30-Bastardi and his team are forecasting that six tropical cyclones will make landfall in the U.S. Five of these landfalling storms are likely to be hurricanes, with three being major hurricanes of Category 3 or greater.
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"There are few areas of the U.S. East Coast and Gulf of Mexico that will not be in the bull's eye at some point this season," said Ken Reeves, AccuWeather's Director of Forecast Operations. Ironically, though, the region that was hammered the hardest last year-the central and eastern Gulf Coast-has one of the lower probabilities of receiving another major hurricane strike in 2006."
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How the 2006 Hurricane Season Will Compare to the 2005 Season
Following on the heels of 2005's record-shattering hurricane season, 2006 will feature fewer storms, but will still be a season of above-average storm frequency.
Well, they sure blew that one didn't they?
But the weather forecasters were not alone. The shrieking high priests of environmental scaremongering used the unusually bad hurricane season of 2005 to launch another salvo in their bid to impose socialist economic principles on the United States masquerading as environmental science.
They lined up to insist that manmade global warming was the cause of the unusually bad hurricane season of 2005 and that we are all doomed unless we agree to their radical prescription for change. This same flawed reasoning was parroted by Democrats who have always had a weak understanding of science. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. went so far as to blame President Bush for the severity of Hurricane Katrina.
Let's not forget the protestors who demanded the resignation of Max Mayfield, Director of the National Hurricane Center because he and other serious climate scientists refused to endorse the scaremongering of "environmental" (socialist) activists.
Climate of Fear
Global-warming alarmists intimidate dissenting scientists into silence.
BY RICHARD LINDZEN
Opinion Journal
Wednesday, April 12, 2006
...Scientists who dissent from the alarmism have seen their grant funds disappear, their work derided, and themselves libeled as industry stooges, scientific hacks or worse. Consequently, lies about climate change gain credence even when they fly in the face of the science that supposedly is their basis.
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In 1992,[Al Gore] ran two congressional hearings during which he tried to bully dissenting scientists, including myself, into changing our views and supporting his climate alarmism. Nor did the scientific community complain when Mr. Gore, as vice president, tried to enlist Ted Koppel in a witch hunt to discredit anti-alarmist scientists--a request that Mr. Koppel deemed publicly inappropriate. And they were mum when subsequent articles and books by Ross Gelbspan libelously labeled scientists who differed with Mr. Gore as stooges of the fossil-fuel industry.
Sadly, this is only the tip of a non-melting iceberg. In Europe, Henk Tennekes was dismissed as research director of the Royal Dutch Meteorological Society after questioning the scientific underpinnings of global warming. Aksel Winn-Nielsen, former director of the U.N.'s World Meteorological Organization, was tarred by Bert Bolin, first head of the IPCC, as a tool of the coal industry for questioning climate alarmism. Respected Italian professors Alfonso Sutera and Antonio Speranza disappeared from the debate in 1991, apparently losing climate-research funding for raising questions.
And then there are the peculiar standards in place in scientific journals for articles submitted by those who raise questions about accepted climate wisdom. At Science and Nature, such papers are commonly refused without review as being without interest.
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Indeed, there is a strange reluctance to actually find out how climate really behaves. In 2003, when the draft of the U.S. National Climate Plan urged a high priority for improving our knowledge of climate sensitivity, the National Research Council instead urged support to look at the impacts of the warming--not whether it would actually happen.
Alarm rather than genuine scientific curiosity, it appears, is essential to maintaining funding. And only the most senior scientists today can stand up against this alarmist gale, and defy the iron triangle of climate scientists, advocates and policymakers.
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