Climate alarmism has led political leaders to abandon reliable and cheap fossil fuels, which in turn has empowered rogue aggressors like Vladimir Putin, inflated energy costs and undermined power reliability for consumers.

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With August in the rearview mirror, did you notice something conspicuously absent?  

Like “the dog that didn’t bark” of Sherlock Holmes mystery fame, it’s meaningful for its nonexistence.  Call it the climate alarm that didn’t sound.  

For the first time in over eight decades, preceding Pearl Harbor and eleven years before Queen Elizabeth II ascended to the throne, the Atlantic Ocean has experienced no named storm – either a tropical storm or hurricane – from July 3 through the end of August.  In fact, the Atlantic has witnessed no hurricanes at all this year, something that has happened only seven times since 1950.  

To be sure, hurricane season hasn't yet ended, several named storms have recently formed without making U.S. landfall, and the threat of future storms demands vigilance.  

What makes that fact especially arresting, however, citing an August 4 warning from CNN, is that the “experts” predicted an above-average hurricane season:  

This Atlantic hurricane season is still expected to be above-normal, forecasts released Thursday by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and Colorado State University show.  Though this season has been less active until now compared to the last two seasons, NOAA and Colorado State expect it to become the seventh consecutive above-normal hurricane season.  

NOAA’s latest projections call for a 60% chance of an above-normal season.  Its forecast calls for 14 to 20 named storms (winds of 39 mph or greater), a slight decrease from the seasonal outlook forecast of 14 to 21 released in May.  The forecast includes the three named storms that have already formed this season:  Alex, Bonnie and Colin…  An average Atlantic hurricane season has 14 named storms, seven hurricanes, and three major hurricanes.  

Had the opposite occurred, with the Atlantic experiencing an exceptionally high number of tropical storms or hurricanes, the mainstream media most certainly would’ve elevated it as another sign of coming climate doom.  

This wouldn’t be the first or most salient hurricane-related climate prediction that fell flat, however.  

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, we were sanctimoniously instructed that its devastation resulted from anthropogenic global warming, and that we could expect more frequent and more severe hurricanes going forward.  Here was Al Gore, summarizing in typical fashion the “climate consensus”:  

Now, the scientific community is warning us that the average hurricane will continue to get stronger because of global warming…  The waters in the Gulf have been unusually warm.  The oceans generally have been getting warmer.  And the pattern is exactly consistent with what scientists have predicted for twenty years.  Two thousand scientists, in a hundred countries, engaged in the most elaborate, well-organized scientific collaboration in the history of humankind, have produced long-since a consensus that we will face a string of terrible catastrophes unless we act to prepare ourselves and deal with the underlying causes of global warming.  

Instead, we subsequently experienced the longest stretch in recorded history without a major hurricane hitting the United States after 2005.  

Going back to 1989 – before the fall of the Berlin Wall and less than a year into the George H.W. Bush administration – United Nations officials warned that “entire nations could be wiped off the face of the earth” by the year 2000 unless we reversed global warming:  

A senior environmental official at the United Nations, Noel Brown, says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the earth by rising sea levels if global warming is not reversed by the year 2000.  Coastal flooding and crop failures would create an exodus of “eco-refugees,” threatening political chaos, said Brown, director of the New York office of the U.N. Environment Program.  He said governments have a 10-year window of opportunity to solve the greenhouse effect.  

Still waiting, approaching forty years later.  

This is the repeatedly discredited climate consensus among experts whom we’re instructed to trust in reorganizing our economy and social lives.  

The point here isn’t to score rhetorical points, or land gratuitous jabs at the climate alarm industrial complex, much as they may deserve it.  Nor does this litany of failed projections necessarily end the complex climate debate, and as noted above the 2022 hurricane season hasn’t yet ended.  

The point is instead to highlight the danger of imposing damaging government policies on the basis of expert assertions most notable for their inaccuracy.  

Climate alarmism has led political leaders to abandon reliable and cheap fossil fuels, which in turn has empowered rogue aggressors like Vladimir Putin, inflated energy costs and undermined power reliability for consumers.  Two years into Joe Biden’s administration, he has leased a record-low 130,000 acres for oil and gas production.  To put that number in perspective, the next-lowest number at this point in an administration was Lyndon Johnson with 1.8 million acres.  

All of this on the basis of a climate alarm movement characterized more often by failure than accuracy.  The sooner we collectively acknowledge the emperor’s lack of clothing and employ greater wisdom in our energy and climate policies, the better off we’ll all be.