A recent CNN article stated, “People move to Asheville to escape extreme weather. They forget their tragic history,” claiming that Asheville, North Carolina, recently suffered damage in the wake of Hurricane Helene It has suffered catastrophic floods and was once considered a “climate paradise” but is now suffering the effects of extreme weather due to climate change. [emphasis, links added]
This is wrong.
It’s a confusing article, flashing back and forth between accurate depictions of historical floods and false climate claims.
in the end, The CNN article shows that the harm caused by Helen is nothing new to Asheville. It is location and weather, not climate change, that have caused recent tragedies.
CNN first explained that “some” outlets (citing just one local TV station) claim Asheville is a “climate paradise” because it's far from the coast and doesn't regularly suffer from wildfires and other “climate extremes.” ” attack.
Jesse Keenan, an associate professor of sustainable real estate and urban planning at Tulane University, said, “So-called climate migrants have long been arriving here from California, Arizona and the coastal Carolinas,” CNN writes, giving an example Explain that people on online forums claim Asheville does not have the natural disaster threats faced by other cities across the country.
These people are misguided because no matter how the climate changes, no place in the world is safe from occasional extreme weather and natural disasters.
To prove Helen was caused by climate change, CNN cited a rapid climate analysis released Tuesday by scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory that found Fossil fuel pollution has increased rainfall by more than 50% in parts of Georgia and the Carolinas,“And that Global warming makes it 20 times more likely to rain in affected areas.
This is nonsense.
A quick attribution study is not really an analysis of the weather; They only analyze counterfactuals in computer models. Presenting them as evidence is deceptive, and the scientists responsible know it.
frequent readers climate realism Know Media relies heavily on attribution models rather than actual available historical data to drive climate narrativessimply because the attribution model starts with hypothesis Human emissions influence weather.
Real-world data does not give this impression. Actually, Hurricane data does not show any increase in the intensity or frequency of tropical cyclones.
although climate realism The alarmism surrounding Helen has been reported on twice recently ( here and here ), and it's worth noting the inconsistency in the CNN article.
After initially making all the claims about climate-enhanced weather, the article suddenly shifts gears and acknowledges that Asheville has suffered similar disasters in the past, long before the modern warming period.
CNN writes that Asheville is “prone to flooding, as its long history has proven.” CNN continues to describe Back-to-back hurricane strikes in 1916 triggered “biblical” floods that devastated the city and the people who lived there.
CNN cited a similar situation in 2004, when two storms “concentrated the highest rainfall in western North Carolina and killed 11 people.”
If CNN looked it up, they would find “Since 1950, every county in North Carolina has experienced at least two major flooding events, either from rising river levels or hurricane surge,” According to the North Carolina Flood Insurance website.
These examples of past extreme weather events Debunking claims that Helen is somehow unprecedented or shows signs of a “climate fingerprint” As claimed by so-called experts quoted by CNN.
climate realism Not the only one to notice this North Carolina has never been a climate paradise. On the Yahoo News page that reposted the CNN post, multiple commenters made similar points:
The locals knew the dangers of living in the valley and apparently thought it was worth the risk.
Newcomers from California and elsewhere, many of whom were clearly so misinformed that they hadn't done their research, were taken by surprise.
When media outlets like CNN understand the region’s weather history, they have no reason to obscure the truth with climate hysteria and alarmist narratives.
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