Bogus Predictions
What Happened to the Hurricanes?
By Daniel Muniz

This summer's back to back superstorms are proof positive we have entered a new period of global warming emergency… We are in a global warming emergency state, and that these storms are going to become more frequent, more intense… There could be more droughts, dust bowls. You know, it's amazing to hear these facts.

Barbara Streisand when interviewed by ABCNEWS's Diane Sawyer

What I find truly amazing is how the media allows sensational rhetoric to be repeated over and over again until the mass mind assumes that it has to be true. Just say the word Katrina and so many people and politicians can rattle off word associations like global warming.

In 2005, the press produced wall to wall media coverage of hurricane Katrina’s devastation to the Gulf coast. They highly publicized the dire predictions from politicians, Hollywood celebrities, and the so-called experts about how each subsequent year from now on would result in the country experiencing more catastrophic storms. The correlation was made that pollution generated by the human race, particularly by the United States, contributed to global warming which in turn caused devastating storms like Katrina and Rita. And more were on their way next year.

Al Gore used that correlation to cash in with his Inconvenient Truth movie. And some trial lawyers are even trying to file class action lawsuits against oil companies and refineries, similar to the numerous tobacco lawsuits, for causing hurricane Katrina. They postulate that since they extract and refine the oil into gasoline which causes pollution, that they must be held directly responsible for the violent storms.

Well, if that is the case, especially with the media constantly publicizing the frightening cataclysmic forecasts, then what happened to the hurricanes of 2006 that were supposed to ravage the Gulf and Atlantic coasts?

In fact, it was a pretty lame hurricane season for the year even though we are in this supposedly emergency state of global warming. Al Gore says that the planet only has ten years left before the damage caused by global warming is irreversible (he also claims that cigarette smoking is another big contributor of greenhouse gasses).

Hurricane Ernesto started to generate news but it quickly fizzled from the media as the storm sputtered out. In fact, the general public, with the exception of the local communities that experienced them, would be hard pressed to even recall the names of the hurricanes that occurred in 2006. In fact, it would be more like, Ernesto who?

But what about the tidal waves, the surges, and the turmoil? The 2006 hurricane season was supposed to be catastrophic because of global warming according to all the sensationalism.

So, what happened? Where’s all the carnage?

If you are looking for answers, you are not going to find them in the media.

In fact, the press rarely admits to errors or to creating false perceptions. Instead, they simply do what is called a rowback which is media lingo for what happens after a sensational or flawed report is broadcasted or hyped up and then the press subsequently publishes more accurate but different stories as if the original story never existed.

As for all the dire predictions made in 200 5 in which the 2006 hurricane season was supposed to be disastrous, the press sure isn’t broadcasting to the public that it made a mistake. It is simply acting as if all the ominous forecasts that they endlessly harped on back in 2005 never existed. And that is an example of a rowback.

But in 2005, the Hurricane Center in Miami reported that with the Atlantic Ocean having a higher sea-surface temperature and along with other factors, there would be a cycle of greater hurricane activity. The center speculates that it is possible for the cycle to last up to forty years or perhaps for a brief time thus hurricanes like Katrina ought to be treated as normal routine weather patterns. However, as it is plain to see, back in 2005 the press broadcasted doom and gloom instead of a scientific analysis of the weather.

Of course rowbacks happen all the time.

The media quietly buried its “end of the world” stories about global cooling and the imminent ice age. In fact, back in 1975, Newsweek Magazine suggested that we ought to put soot on the polar ice caps to melt the snow in order to prevent the pending deep freeze of the planet. Naturally, the press pretended that such reporting never existed when global warming became en vogue.

Hilariously, politicians like Senator Inhofe from Oklahoma wouldn’t let the press off the hook that easily. On the senate floor, he hammered away at Time and Newsweek for their media sensations about the coming ice age.

Just recently, Newsweek finally addressed that rowback although they insisted that they were never actually wrong in that they simply reported what the scientific community told them. But they conveniently overlooked the fact that they had also downplayed the skeptics to global cooling of that time frame (much like how they are discounting today’s skeptics) and how they pretended for the past two decades that the looming ice age stories never existed.

But for the most part, the press isn’t interested in dull boring scientific analysis. The general public has little enthusiasm for bland weather reports even if it means that they will be informed of the facts. Instead, the media knows that our society has an insatiable appetite for sensationalism especially when it involves devastation which is why they couldn’t get enough of hurricane Katrina and the predictions of our own destruction by Mother Nature.

Unfortunately, there is almost nothing written about the supposedly terrible hurricane season that was supposed to hit us in 2006. To no one’s surprise, the press is acting as if all the hype of 2005 never existed even though they saturated the public with media coverage, which is simply another example of a rowback.

Overall, it is much too often a lost cause to expect the media to present the news in a balanced format and the wild hurricane predictions after Katrina is testament to that.

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