The Nightmare Scenario - Will Global Warming be Blamed?

Well hurricane Irene is headed for North Carolina. Right now it is leaving the Bahamas as a category 3 storm. According to the chart above it should strike North Carolina as a category 2. Some are saying this is the "nightmare scenario".

Hmmm, well when I look at it I don't find anything at all so special about Irene. Plenty of category 2 storms have struck North Carolina in the past. This is really nothing out of the ordinary. By Sunday afternoon it is supposed to be down to a category 1, again nothing special.

The special thing about this storm is the track. It is supposed to go right up the I-95 corridor. If it does there is no doubt it will create quite a mess. If it veered 100 miles to the west it would make landfall and quickly dissipate. If it veered 100 miles to the east most of its effects would be over open water. So it is not the strength of Irene but the track which is determined by the position of the Bermuda high and the position of the jet stream over the United States.

Somehow if Irene does make history as a major troublemaker, I have a feeling the global warming hoaxers will come crawling out from under their rocks spewing more of the nonsense of man-made global warming. It will be most interesting to me to see how they will explain how global warming can effect the position of steering currents and turn a rather large but otherwise plain vanilla hurricane into a real troublemaker.

From what I have read, Katrina actually made landfall as a category 3 rather than the cat 5 status it had over the Gulf of Mexico. It seems that the destruction most of the time is a matter of where the hurricane strikes rather than the intensity of the storm. Beware to those who choose to live on the coast!

It is a similar thing with tornadoes. I have heard it said that if the tornado that devastated Joplin, MO. had passed 20 miles to the south, it would have been over open country and we probably would not have heard much of anything about it.

Somewhere tonight, Algore is screeching and wringing his hands.