Least Hurricanes "Ever"

No Major Hurricane Has Made Landfall In the U.S. In More Than 9 Years -- and That's a New Record - weather.com:

Like most current climate data, "ever" is from the carefully selectected end of the Little Ice Age in 1860. Perhaps warming climate caused the Civil War?

This is now the longest streak since hurricane records began in 1851. The previous record was a little over nine years, set from August 11, 1860 to September 8, 1869.

I've been blogging for 10 years. When 2005 was a record year for major hurricanes, especially after Katrina, scientists and the media were even more certain that their predictions on warming and large increases in the number of hurricanes were completely proven -- and we would definitely see more major storms every year. Here is a blog post from '06 pointing out that we had no major storms that year even after those confident predictions ... it is also funny to see what a broken record I am on thinking for yourself! 

Here we see a quiet little article from 2013 saying that we almost broke a record for latest hurricane in the season that had been set in 1851 ...

Or we can go back to a post from 2013 when the lack of warming finally fell completely outside of even the lowest possible predictions of the IPCC warming model. 

I wasn't blogging when the "certain truth" on oil went from "the world is out of oil" in the late '70s to "huh"? by 1983. I also wasn't blogging when "generally accepted public / media opinion" went from "OMG, Reagan is NUTS!!!!, he thinks the USSR can be defeated"!!!! in 1980, to "Well, the USSR is gone, we all knew that was going to happen and Reagan slowed it down" in 1989 (Berlin Wall falls) - 1991 (USSR officially ends).

I wasn't blogging -- but I was alive. I've seen how "certainty" turns to "the memory hole". Once confident front page news becomes articles buried or just not discussed.   People who once passionately told you that any disagreement with their dominant position was "crazy", "being a denier", "foolishly following right wing media" or some such, now basically just stare as cows at the passing train if their own formerly passionately held positions are mentioned.

It turns out that their passion was and is for being a sheep in lock-step with the current standard Party (D) and Media position -- and it is IMPOSSIBLE for them to conceive that people could think differently from that position and be correct. Therefore,  if necessary, history must be forgotten or rewritten so the standard Party/Media position is seen as correct -- always. Orwell covered this all long ago -- their minds are imprisoned in what they are told to believe. 

There is an alternative ... actual skepticism. My belief is that the strongest earthly reason for religious faith is that it provides a grounding for the human psyche allowing one to look at everything else in the world as being less than certain. If you don't have faith in SOMETHING as being unshakably true, you are going to create something and invest your "faith neurons" in. The old saw "everyone has to believe in something, I believe I'll have another beer" is true -- beer is just a very flip alternate faith. Our brains our wired for belief and morality -- we need to put something in the "belief slot", or something will fall in that slot without us even realizing it. 

There are a number of books on this kind of topic, but a couple that I have blogged on are "The Righteous Mind"  and "Consilience" ... our problem is often that since we have no real idea of what our consciousness and many of our inner drivers really are at the base, so we make assumptions about things like religion, politics, culture, society, etc that while seemingly "rational", fail to realize that humans are NOT "rational", but rather RATIONALIZING beings. Our real drivers are feelings -- but we will often go to great length to try to convince ourselves and others that they are not.

Watching the AGW (Anthropomorphic Global Warming) theory slink off to oblivion gives another great opportunity to see how "what everyone KNOWS to be true" very often isn't ... the cholesterol shift is another recent one.

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