RUSH: I am holding this latest story right here in my formerly nicotine stained fingers: “Forecasters See Less Active ’06 Hurricane Season” (Gasping.) “The United States hurricane season will be slightly less intense this year than first predicted with nine hurricanes expected to form, government forecasters said on Tuesday, but they warned the most dangerous part of the season was still to come.” Really? We know this. The peak is in the middle of September. NOAA “said the 2006 season could produce between 12 to 15 named storms, with seven to nine becoming hurricanes and three or four of them being classified as ‘major’ hurricanes that could threaten the U.S. Atlantic and Gulf coasts.”
Now, you know, I want to be very careful here because these people have a tough job. They have incredible expectations placed on them, and those expectations are not helped by all the media hype about hurricanes and disasters and so forth, but come on. Does anybody really expect that they can tell you in April or March what’s going to happen in a hurricane season? They think they do, but the best that we can do is issue a wild guess based on data that we have collected and analyzed in computers over a number of years in the past. Remember we were told a new cycle here? Global warming was a debated topic as to whether or not it affected hurricanes, but regardless, new cycle, intense hurricanes, lot more of them, brace yourselves!
Well, guess what? The upper level winds are shearing the tops off these babies when they form out there, and you know what else? Atlantic Ocean surface temperatures are not nearly as warm as they were last year. (Gasping.) How can that be, ladies and gentlemen? Global warming should be consistently heating things up, should it not? Speaking of global warming — may I say “global warming,” anybody? All of this is just patently ridiculous and nonsensical. We’ve had three named storms, no hurricanes yet in the Atlantic theater. The ones that have formed haven’t amounted to much. The last one, this dude, Chris, I mean the forecast track had it going all the way to either Mexico or Texas and so forth, then the next two hours, “Sorry, it’s dissipated. It’s gone. It’s just a low pressure. It’s a bunch of thunderstorms over Cuba.”
I mean, even a forecast of just two or three days ahead was not right, with an existing storm out there. Now, the models, some of the models said it was going to dissipate but the hurricane center said it can’t afford to predict it will dissipate because people’s guard will be let down. My only point in all this is here they’re revising it down because now there’s less time for a bunch of hurricanes to happen, they didn’t expect the shear, you can’t predict the winds. I mean, anybody who thinks they can predict the winds a year out… You can’t predict cloud cover. You can’t tell people what the cloud cover tomorrow is going to be.
Maybe as a percentage of the sky that’s covered by clouds, but even that is a wild guess. Cloud formation still defies the most brilliant among us. Just look skyward and marvel at it. So any of these attempts to suggest that there is global warming — global warming, by the way, ought to be totally refuted just with what’s happened here in the hurricane season so far. Atlantic Ocean surface temperatures alone should be an indication they’re not nearly as warm this year as they were last, and yet global warming is intensifying and getting worse every year. How do these two things co-exist? One’s a forecast, one’s a wild guess. The other one is a reality, and the reality, as always, disproves the wild guess.