Presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg said in his announcement speech this week that climate change could be “the greatest security issue of our time” as evidenced by a series of severe weather events.
As the current Democrat-du-jour and a darling of the left, Mr. Buttigieg played to his crowd last Sunday, telling Americans we must “pick up our heads up to face what might be the greatest security issue of our time: climate change and climate disruption.”
Mayor Pete went on to blame “climate change” for a number of severe weather events, of the sort that have been happening for millennia.
“No region of our country is immune to that threat,” he said. “We have seen it in the floods in Nebraska, the tornados in Alabama, the hurricane in Puerto Rico, and the fires in California.
“We saw it right here in this city, where as mayor we had to fire up the operations center, the emergency operations center in this city twice in two years, first came a thousand-year rainfall and then came a 500-year river flood, 18 months apart. Now by my math, the chance of that happening is about 125,000 to one,” he said.
“Our economy is on the line, our future is on the line, lives are on the line,” Buttigieg concluded.
“So, let’s call this what it is: climate security a life and death issue for our generation,” said the openly gay millennial and second-term mayor of South Bend, Indiana.
Curiously, despite Mayor Pete’s attempts to link climate change to increasingly bad weather, 2018 was the first year on record with no violent tornadoes in the United States, according to a report by the Washington Post.
According to Post weather writer Ian Livingston, while record-breaking, 2018 was not altogether exceptional, since “there have been downtrends in violent tornado numbers both across the entire modern period, and when looking at just the period since Doppler radar was fully implemented across the country in the mid-1990s.”
As the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has noted, many recent climatological events and trends “can be explained by the natural variability of the climate system,” without excluding an indeterminate influence from atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases. In the same report, the WMO said that researchers have not yet been able to ascertain “the respective roles being played by climate variability and human-induced climate change.”
Moreover, many climate scientists acknowledge the practical impossibility of correlating specific meteorological events to “global warming.”
As Nature magazine explained in 2012, “climate attribution” — the attempt to link singular weather events to manmade global warming — “rests on a comparison of the probability of an observed weather event in the real world with that of the ‘same’ event in a hypothetical world without global warming.”
As critics have observed, such attribution claims “are unjustifiably speculative, basically unverifiable and better not made at all.”
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