Reagan: Hurricane shouldn’t be political

Published 12:27 pm Friday, September 30, 2022

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Hurricane Ian hadn’t slammed into the Florida coast yet and already the idiots were playing politics.

The climate scientists on “The View” were somehow trying to blame Florida’s Gov. Ron DeSantis for Ian because of his skeptical position on global warming.

I don’t know what DeSantis specifically believes about climate change, its causes, its dangers and its cures.

But I do know it’s the opposite of the logic-challenged “The View” ladies and the climate hysterics employed by the Biden administration and the major media.

The people who think our planet will catch on fire unless we turn the clock of civilization back 500 years acted this week like Ian was the first major hurricane to ever strike Florida.

Hurricanes have always gotten a ton of national attention from the news media — for obvious reasons.

But now, like everything else these days, they’ve become politicized.

Climate change nuts and their fellow travelers in the media hold up each named hurricane as one of their “proofs” that modern mankind’s burning of fossil fuels has doomed the planet.

But hurricanes are to Florida what earthquakes, fires and droughts are to California. What tornadoes are to Kansas and Nebraska. What Ice Ages every 100,000 years or so are to Mother Earth.

Sensible climate scientists like Bjorn Lomborg of Sweden know that despite Ian’s power and devastation, the average number and intensity of hurricanes striking the U.S. each decade has not increased this century.

Lomborg believes the globe is warming. But he says human activity is responsible for only a fraction of it and does not pose an existential threat to Earth or to us.

Not now. Not soon. And anyway, slowly warming temperatures are something he says we can easily prepare for and adapt to thanks to our wealth and technology.

Lomborg also stresses that cold kills at least seven times more humans around the world each year than heat — which probably explains why I’ve never heard of a single person who’s left California and moved to the Yukon.

I believe the Earth is warming, but I’m with Lomborg. It’s not man-made.

I’m no climate expert, that’s for sure. But I know Earth is real big. It’s real complex. It’s not even a speck compared to the gigantic Sun that allows life to exist on our planet.

Earth’s tilted axis, its eccentric orbit around the Sun, its huge weather patterns, ocean currents, ice caps, volcanoes, slowly creeping continents, minutely growing and eroding mountain ranges — they all have far more to do with the changes in Earth’s climate than us puny humans.

Blaming man for global climate change is not only arrogant, it’s bogus. It only gives politicians and environmentalists more power to tell us what we’re allowed to do so they can solve “the problem.”

But the problem isn’t caused by man, it’s caused by nature.

The Ice Ages came and went every 100,000 years — and one will come again. We’re lucky as heck to be in the warm period between two of them now or there’d still be two miles of ice on top of New York City.

And before we drop this subject, will someone please tell the ladies of “The View” the story about what happened on Sept. 19, 1559, to the Spanish conquistadors who established a colony on the Gulf Coast of Florida near what’s now Pensacola.

Five weeks after they arrived a powerful hurricane hit them — they apparently weren’t watching the Weather Channel — and destroyed most of the settlement and their fleet.

They tried to rebuild, but in 1561 the Spanish government gave up. It decided Florida’s Gulf Coast was so dangerous it left and didn’t come back to settle again for 134 years.

As far as I know, SUVs, F-150s and Gov. DeSantis had nothing to do with that 1559 hurricane, either.

Michael Reagan, the son of President Ronald Reagan, is an author, speaker and president of the Reagan Legacy Foundation. Send comments to reagan@caglecartoons.com and follow @reaganworld on Twitter.