Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
After a slow start to the 2024 Hurricane Season, it seems like Mother Nature wants to make up for lost time. First Helene hit the Florida Panhandle and caused a disaster in Appalachia. And this week, Hurricane Milton struck an area of the Florida Gulf Coast that hadn’t be hit with a storm this strong in more than 100 years. On Episode #130 of The Climate Realism Show, The Heartland Institute’s H. Sterling Burnett, Anthony Watts, Linnea Lueken, and Jim Lakely welcome back Stan Goldenberg, one of the nation’s top hurricane experts, to break down Hurricane Milton. Was this actually and officially a “major” hurricane by the time it made landfall?
We will also cover some of the Crazy Climate News of the Week, including Bill Nye saying if you need to vote for Kamala Harris to stop hurricanes, Al Gore exploiting hurricanes for fun and profit, and the seemingly unsinkable and ridiculous notion that humans are able to seed and even steer hurricanes.
Creators & Guests
Host
H. Sterling Burnett
H. Sterling Burnett, Ph.D., hosts The Heartland Institute’s Environment and Climate News podcast. Burnett also is the director of Heartland’s Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy, is the editor of Heartland's Climate Change Weekly email, and oversees the production of the monthly newspaper Environment & Climate News. Prior to joining The Heartland Institute in 2014, Burnett worked at the National Center for Policy Analysis for 18 years, ending his tenure there as senior fellow in charge of environmental policy. He has held various positions in professional and public policy organizations within the field. Burnett is a member of the Environment and Natural Resources Task Force in the Texas Comptroller’s e-Texas commission, served as chairman of the board for the Dallas Woods and Water Conservation Club, is a senior fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, works as an academic advisor for Collegians for a Constructive Tomorrow, is an advisory board member to the Cornwall Alliance, and is an advisor for the Energy, Natural Resources and Agricultural Task Force at the American Legislative Exchange Council.
Guest
Anthony Watts
Anthony Watts has been in the weather business both in front of, and behind the camera as an on-air television meteorologist since 1978, and currently does daily radio forecasts. He has created weather graphics presentation systems for television, specialized weather instrumentation, as well as co-authored peer-reviewed papers on climate issues.
Guest
What is Heartland Daily Podcast?
The “fire hose” of all podcasts produced by The Heartland Institute, a national free-market think tank.
And that's what climate change is about. It is literally not figuratively a clear and present danger.
Greta Thunberg:We are in the beginning of a mass mass extinction.
Jim Lakely:The ability of c 02 to do the heavy work of creating a climate catastrophe is almost nil at this point.
Anthony Watts:The price of oil has been artificially elevated to the point of insanity.
Sterling Burnett:That's not how you power a modern industrial system.
Andy Singer:The ultimate goal of this renewable energy, you know, plan is to reach the exact same point that we're at now.
Sterling Burnett:Yeah. You know who's trying that? Germany. 7 straight days of no wind for Germany. Their factories are shutting down.
Linnea Lueken:They really do act like weather didn't happen prior to, like, 1910. Today is Friday.
Jim Lakely:That's right, Greta. It is Friday. It's the best day of the week because it is the day that the Heartland Institute broadcasts this here Climate Realism Show. I'm Jim Lakely, vice president of the Heartland Institute, and your host. There is nothing else like the Climate Realism Show streaming anywhere, so I hope that you will like, share, and subscribe, and leave your comments under this video as you watch it.
Jim Lakely:These all convince YouTube's algorithm to smile upon this program, which gets the show in front of even more eyes. And as a reminder, big tech and the legacy media do not approve at all of the way we cover climate and energy policy on the Climate Realism Show, so Heartland's YouTube channel has been demonetized. So if you wanna support this program, please visit heartland.org/tcrs. That's heartland.org/tcrs, which stands for the Climate Realism Show. And you can help us, make sure that this show is happening every single Friday.
Jim Lakely:Any support that you can give us is warmly welcome and greatly appreciated. We also wanna thank our streaming partners that helps get this show in front of more people. That's junk science.com, CFACT, and what's up with that. Today, we have, a lot to cover, so we'll try to get through as much as we can, plus your questions, and answers at the end of the show. And today, we have with us, as usual, Anthony Watts.
Jim Lakely:He's the senior fellow at the Heartland Institute and publisher of the most influential climate website in the world. What's up with that? We have h Sterling Burnett. He's the director of the Arthur b Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy at the Heartland Institute. And we also have with us Linnea Lukin.
Jim Lakely:She's a research fellow for energy environment policy at Heartland. And with us today, just to start the program off, we have a, a special guest. That's, Tim Benson. He does, energy policy and and also education policy at the Heartland Institute. We're bringing him on at the top of the show here because he lives in Florida, and he was we were texting each other as the storm was approaching, and he was giving me updates on how things were going for as long as he hoped his his power was gonna hold out.
Jim Lakely:Tim Benson is a resident of Stuart, Florida. He lives on a barrier island on the Atlantic side. But even over there, it was quite, quite the storm to experience. So, welcome, Tim. Glad you and your family are safe and sound and that you have enough power to be on the program today.
Tim Benson:Well, thanks for having me, everybody. It's, truly career highlight to be on the, Climate Realism Show, so I can I can check that one off my bucket list? And so if there's one good thing to come out of the storm, it's clearly that, this we need right now.
Stan Goldenberg:What? That's right. So so so, Tim, I know that, we were texting each other, and you were giving, you and you and your colleagues some further updates on what was going on. There was a there was the first band that came through, had with it some some pretty severe weather, and and you talked about some tornadoes, so the the number of tornado warnings that you've gotten you'd never seen before. Why don't you, talk a little bit about what your experience was even on the Atlantic side Florida?
Tim Benson:Yeah. Sure. Well, just to fact check you a little bit. I don't live in Stuart anymore. I'm up in still on the same island on Hutchinson Island, but I'm up in Fort Pierce on the north end of the island.
Tim Benson:It's like a as you said, it's a barrier island. It's basically like a 20 mile long sandbar, and it's probably not, you know, more than a quarter of a mile wide at any point. So would it be yeah. So for the oh, anyway, for those of you, just trying to figure out where that is, not listening in, it's, so we're about 40 miles north of West Palm Beach. So, if you go from Palm Beach to Jupiter Island to Hutchinson Island, that's where we are, on the Atlantic Coast.
Tim Benson:So, yeah, you know, we just had, you know, normal sort of storm preparation. We weren't really sure how bad it was supposed to be because we were, you know, based on every update at the track, we were, like, moving out of the cone, then moving into the cone, then moving a little farther into the cone, and then, you know, slowly back out of the cone. So by Wednesday afternoon, when things really started picking up, we were outside of the cone, slightly outside of the cone. So you think, alright. Well, it's not gonna be that bad.
Tim Benson:And then, you know, like you said, just kept getting these, emergency warnings on my iPhone. Like, every, you know, 15 minutes, the really annoying ones that blare extremely loudly, and, they're hard to shut off and all that. And there's, you know, tornado warning. Tornado warning. Tornado warning.
Tim Benson:Tornado warning. And, you know, honestly, you know, most Floridians don't take or don't take those very seriously just because, you know, we don't really get, tornadoes that can cause, you know, significant damage like the ones that happened with this storm. You know, normally, there's always tornadoes with that come with hurricanes, but they're usually very, very small. You know? Like, you get water spouts and stuff like that, and, you know, maybe something that touches down that'll, you know, rip some shingles off of somebody's house or anything, but not like, you know, when people think you know, when people picture a tornado in their mind, you know, a big ass, huge, you know, thick tornado, those are the ones, apparently we're getting windy.
Tim Benson:We didn't I didn't know that on the island at the time. We just kept getting the the updates, but nothing touched down here. But, then, you know, you go online, and you start seeing videos and stuff, and you start hearing reports of touchdowns. And, it was obvious pretty quickly that, you know, this was something sort of unprecedented for our area. You know, there was a there was a community, you know, a 55 plus, like, a retirement community about 7 miles northwest of where I am on the mainland, and they took a couple direct hits.
Tim Benson:There were, I think, 6 dead in that community itself. You know, I mean, there was tornadoes all the way down, big, you know, very damaging tornadoes all the way down to into Palm Beach County, which is 2 counties south of here. Palm Beach Gardens, Wellington, I mean, you know, seeing videos of of, you know, cars being, like, smashed in the houses and overturned and things like that. And, you know, saw one video of a tornado crossing Interstate 95, and it looked like, literally, you were watching, you know, like, the one of those Twister movies. And, you know, a friend of mine had a tornado go through his backyard, didn't touch his house, but, took out a couple trees, basically sent his his kids a trampoline, like, 2 blocks over, found it in the neighbor's yard a few blocks away.
Tim Benson:But, yeah, it really took everybody by surprise. And, you know, with the tornadoes, there's nothing. You know, Florida being so the water table being so high, there's no, there's no basements anywhere in South Florida at least, and there might be some up in the Panhandle or anything like that. But, the water table's too high to, you know, to really do basement, so no one has a tornado shelter or warning. So, you know, when you get a tornado warning, there's there's no place you can really go other than, you know, an interior room and stand under a doorway.
Tim Benson:But, you know, if you get a direct hit from something, you know, like, especially the size of the ones we had that came in on Wednesday afternoon, I mean, you had no chance, really. So, so that was really the worst of the the storm for us, and that was before the storm even made landfall. Then it stopped raining around 4 o'clock, and, but that's expected. Like, rain comes and goes and hurricanes, and, you know, it's not usually continuously or especially when they're offshore. But we didn't get any rain again until, like, 10:30.
Tim Benson:We had another band come in, and that was about it. And then other than that, the wind just started picking up as Milton came ashore and started moving east, and had some tropical storm force winds, and now some gusts. Nothing no damage to me, but, you know, power lines down and, branches down and stuff like that. We lost power for a few hours. But, like I was telling you guys earlier, luckily, I lived, like, right next door to the mayor.
Tim Benson:So so my so my power was off for only about 2 or 3 hours, so, pays to live by, you know, people on authority.
Jim Lakely:So this was so you've had you've had hurricanes come in through the gulf and cross the peninsula and and past you. This is the worst storm you've you've experienced that's done that?
Tim Benson:As far as the tornadoes, yeah. I mean, I've I've there's been, hurricanes that have caused more damage, like when we had Francis and Jean back in 2004.
Stan Goldenberg:Mhmm.
Tim Benson:Francis was a cat 2. Jean was a cat 3, and they made landfall, within a mile and a half of each other within 20 days of each other Wow. Which was so much fun, for all of you out there. That was it was like yeah. Everything just started getting back to normal, power back on and all that stuff from Francis, and then was like, oh, by the way, here comes Jean.
Jim Lakely:So I knew
Stan Goldenberg:that.
Tim Benson:But, no. That was more substantial, like, building damage and damage to wildlife and flora and all that kind of stuff. But this, the we've never had anything like the tornadoes.
Jim Lakely:Yeah. Alright. And so and so just before we let you go, what's how's how would you grade the recovery, process at this point?
Tim Benson:Well, I'm on the other coast, so it's not really that bad for us, I mean, other than the tornadoes. But it seems like it's going pretty well, you know, on the West Coast. I mean, Florida, luckily, we've had some we've had a string of very competent governors when it comes to storm management. It's basically, like, the one thing you can't mess up if you're a Florida governor. You know?
Tim Benson:Like, it like, you have to you have to perform well at at the the hurricane stuff and the recovery efforts and all that. So, DeSantis has done a great job. You know, just, you know, they've had some pretty wicked storm surge on the gulf. I know Saint Pete got something like 18 inches of rain in a day, which is, like, biblical. So it's gonna take some time, for those beachfront communities there to recover in, you know, some of the places that were in the path from all the way up to Orlando and, Cape Canaveral and all that stuff.
Tim Benson:But, but this wasn't anything like, like Andrew or, you know, anything like that. You know, it wasn't that bad. So, it's just, really, like I said over here, sort of just a normal storm other than the unprecedented size of the tornadoes that took everybody by surprise and, unfortunately, took out a lot of people.
Jim Lakely:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's it's it's terrible, and I'm glad that you and your family are okay because a lot of people around you are not okay, but, even on the on the East Coast. So, appreciate I'm gonna let you go here, Tim. I appreciate the, the update.
Jim Lakely:Glad you're safe.
Speaker 8:Yeah. No problem, guys.
Jim Lakely:Hopefully, that's the last one you'll have to deal with this season, and we'll, we'll talk to you again. Oh, and by the way, Tim Benson has his own podcast. It's called Books with Benson. He, interviews fantastic authors, mostly historical books, so you wanna check that out anywhere you can get podcasts, books with Benson. So, thanks a lot, Tim.
Jim Lakely:Glad you're okay.
Stan Goldenberg:See you guys.
Jim Lakely:Alright. And so, we're gonna bring in our special guest that's on the thumbnail and everything, and that is, Stan Goldenberg. This is your 2nd time on the, on the show, Stan, in this, hurricane season. Stan is, one of the nation's leading hurricane experts. He works for he's a hurricane specialist.
Jim Lakely:He works for a, pretty prestigious, outfit. I'll just say that, when it comes to hurricanes. And, so, Stan, glad to have you on the show.
Stan Goldenberg:Great. And I'm a am I unmuted right now, I hope?
Jim Lakely:You are. Yes. Yes.
Stan Goldenberg:And let me just say, I'm coming doing this on my own time. This is my disclaimer. And not that I'm told not to, but I'm doing this on my own time, and my views do not necessarily represent those of my employer, even though they're really from most of the research that I really do there. But we'll just call it on my own time. And by the way, what Tim just said, those two storms, Florida got hit by 4 major hurricanes in 6 weeks back in 2004.
Stan Goldenberg:Four major hurricanes in 6 weeks, and the 2 he mentioned were were some of them on the East Coast of Florida. So Florida hurricanes are nothing new. Florida getting hit by hurricanes are nothing new, And lots of rainfall with hurricanes is nothing new. And lots of damage, sadly. So we're gonna get into all that as we continue on here.
Jim Lakely:We we are. Although this the subject is serious and the damage is serious, then the loss of life is serious. You know, we we do have a segment on this show, and we and we enjoy it, and I know our audience does too. It's called the crazy climate news of the week. And when it comes to this storm, there was quite a bit of crazy climate news.
Jim Lakely:So hit the drop, Andy. Alright. So that tickled Stan. And, that's Bill Nye in our in our drop there on the Crazy Climate News of the Week. And as a matter of fact, Bill Nye got himself, in the news and to our attention based on this storm.
Jim Lakely:He was on CNN, and, he had a, particularly interesting message when it came to the storm and what humans can do. So, why don't you play that video, Bill Nye, for us, Andy?
Jim Lakely:The other side, as we often call it, is plan has no plans to address climate change. No plans for long term, dealing with these sorts of problems. If you have young voters out there, encourage them to vote. People say, what can I do about climate change? If we were talking about it, associating it with big storms like this, that would be really good, but the main thing is vote.
Jim Lakely:Thank you.
Speaker 8:And, Bill, very quickly, how much of an impact do you see climate change playing in all of these ex explanations that you've given us? You know, how much do you see climate change as being a part of that?
Bill Nye:Oh, it's no question everybody. Look. There's no in climate science, everybody has been studying this for years. Everybody has been commenting. Scientific papers have been written about how warm the ocean is, around, the Florida Peninsula.
Bill Nye:And it's this warm, warm water that is, driving these storms and enabling it to have to intensify so quickly. Everybody, be careful out there. Let's get through this.
Stan Goldenberg:Yeah. So so that's my apologies. That was MSNBC, not CNN. Although, what the hell's the difference anymore? But, Stan, I know that, debunking this engineer and not an an actual scientist is one of your favorite hobbies.
Jim Lakely:So go once you have first crack.
Stan Goldenberg:Well, actually, just let me mention terminology is important, and climate change is not the same as man made or anthropogenic climate change, aka global warming. And, that's the sad thing. It's like, the climate's always changing. It's what Patrick Michaels told John Stossel way back when that that opened our eyes. The climate is all when people say we're gonna stop climate change, it's like no.
Stan Goldenberg:No way, no. How are you gonna stop the climate from changing? But as far as man made climate change, all for all their studies, their studies and scientists showing the opposite view, and I personally do not believe we're seeing any substantial change or measurable change from, climate trends, anthropogenic climate change, on hurricane activity have to be my field of expertise. So I'll let you steer where you wanna go.
Jim Lakely:Sure. Anthony, anything to add to Stan's observation? You're on mute, by the way. You're muted, Anthony.
Stan Goldenberg:Sorry about that.
Jim Lakely:No worries.
Stan Goldenberg:Yeah. You know, the only thing I can say the first thing that came to my mind when I watched Bill Nye on MSNBC was, the stupid, it burns. Seriously, he's he and a bunch of other people that call themselves climate scientists have swallowed this idea that climate change affects weather. They've swallowed it hook, line, and sinker. But the bottom line is is that climate science in the form of the IPCC says there is no effect whatsoever on hurricanes.
Stan Goldenberg:Zilch. 0. Nada. Not there. They put published this in their AR six report, and, you'll find a table on my website on the right sidebar, under, you know, climate attributions and so forth.
Stan Goldenberg:It's just not there. And the the number of hurricanes is not increasing. The, the the intensity of hurricanes is not increasing. And all this was was disaster theater. That's all this was.
Stan Goldenberg:You know, they get a few people on and say, hey. Climate change is making it worse, you know, and doom is just around the corner, and we have to vote vote out climate change as if you can actually do something as if the Earth actually gives a damn about what we vote for. It's just you know? It's insane. It is just absolutely insane.
Stan Goldenberg:But then again, it's Bill Nye. So there you go.
Speaker 5:If I if I could weigh in
Stan Goldenberg:Can I can I jump in right away with that? Again, we're so used to saying climate change, which is man made climate change for short. Changes in climate do affect how many hurricanes and the intensity we have, but those are natural fluctuations in climate.
Stan Goldenberg:And Yeah. It's made made less.
Stan Goldenberg:Right. Right. And, oh, there's all sorts of stuff out there. And and the thing is this too is they can sit there and show all sorts of graphs and all sorts of charts, and I review paper sometimes and see other studies that seem to say, you know, this stuff is making hurricanes worse. And that's why the talk I gave, we should put the link up, from the, your last Heartland Conference in Orlando, is it really getting worse?
Stan Goldenberg:And you have to really look at the data in a careful way. I'm gonna give you one big example. I'll just throw this in right at the beginning. I've seen study after study that shows Atlantic hurricane activity starting in around 1970 going to the present. Why did they start in 1970?
Stan Goldenberg:Because that's when satellite data started. You're better after that. The problem is that's the start of a low activity, multi decadal scale era that went for about 24 years, then it switched to a high activity era. They start in the low, they end up with the high, and you get this massive trend that looks like everything is getting much worse. But if you pull back the curtain and look at the activity before 1970, you see another high activity era.
Stan Goldenberg:So, I mean, this is still happening. People do this stuff, and they don't understand there's a cycle. There's a clear cycle. But they and some do it out of ignorance. Some, I think, know what they're doing.
Stan Goldenberg:So go ahead. Someone else wanted to say Yeah.
Speaker 5:I'd like to weigh in. So, look. The reason the IPCC is important in this discussion is because we're often told that they are the gold standard. They are the experts. That's who you listen to.
Speaker 5:Now environmentalists are complaining they're not alarmist enough, on hurricanes in particular, but the problem is, as as Anthony said, look, it's not just the IPCC says they can find no fingerprint, no evidence that climate change is affecting hurricanes so far. They project outwards. They project with the worst case scenario, RCP 8.5, which they themselves now say is unrealistic and and likely impossible. But even under the worst case scenario, in 2050, they detect they they they say we can attribute nothing changing vis a vis hurricanes to climate change. Then they look out at 21100.
Speaker 5:Well, maybe the climate signal will be then. Nope. That's not what the IPCC says. So when when they call this group the gold standard, that tells me that Bill Nye is nowhere near the gold standard. He's like the lead standard.
Speaker 5:No one should listen to anything Bill Nye has to say about anything regarding climate.
Jim Lakely:Yep. Okay. And speaking of, people who you should not listen to when it comes to climate, that's one Al Gore. He he seems to enjoy exploiting extreme weather for, for fun and profit. So, producer Andy, can you play that Al Gore clip, please?
Speaker 9:We saw the city of New Orleans devastated by hurricane Katrina. We saw this city, flattened, in the, you know, the south part of this city by super storm Sandy. We've we've seen the fires out. We've already seen so many catastrophic consequences that are exactly what the scientists predicted would occur, and yet, it it has not brought us across the political tipping point yet. I think that it will.
Speaker 9:I recently checked to see, how what percentage of Americans have been under an extreme weather alert during the 1st 8 months of this year? The answer, 100%. Every single person in the United States has been at one time or another this year under an extreme weather alert, and the extremes related to the climate are getting worse regularly. I used to when I started giving my slideshows, Andrew, on climate, I would pick examples of the various, impacts from 10 years ago, 5 years ago. Now you can say this was yesterday.
Speaker 9:This was the day before yesterday. This is going on right now. And right now, you pointed to this, intensifying hurricane, coming toward the Gulf Coast. But at the same time, we have once in a 1000 year rainfalls in in Central Europe, unprecedented fires in Portugal, unprecedented drought in Namibia, and I could keep going. It's it's happening all over the world.
Speaker 9:But, frankly, the fact that it is global in its man in its dimensions is one of the reasons it's hard for us, as human beings, to we're not to to deal with it because we're not used to thinking in that in that context.
Jim Lakely:Anthony Watts, there is a a parade of misinformation, as the term goes, in that little clip. Maybe you can start highlighting and correcting some of it.
Stan Goldenberg:Well, one of the things I'll say about citing specific events, you know, is that 50 years ago, we didn't hear about this stuff. Right? And so that makes it all about climate change. No. It's not.
Stan Goldenberg:What we've got is increased reporting of severe weather events around the world. We have the Internet. We have people with cell phones all over the planet. You know? And so any kind of abnormal weather event or a curious weather event gets reported almost immediately.
Stan Goldenberg:What does Al Gore do? Uh-huh. Climate change right there.
Stan Goldenberg:See it? Yeah. Yep. Yep.
Stan Goldenberg:It's not that. It's an increased reporting syndrome. We saw the same thing with tornadoes. You know? Tornado coverage is instantaneous now.
Stan Goldenberg:50 years ago, some tornadoes went through the middle of the United States and were never seen because they went through a cornfield or whatever. Never reported. So, it's just not true what Gore is saying. Severe weather is not getting worse, and there are several metrics in place from the scientific community that show that it's not true. Gore is just using it to push his agenda.
Jim Lakely:Yep. I mean, Linnea, you you were, you're the youngest person on this panel, and you were brought up, in a in a education world where you probably had to sit there and watch An Inconvenient Truth, in class. You might have been one of those. I know a lot of students had to. What do you what do you think and now that you've done so much research and are such an expert on on climate and energy when you listen to Al Gore?
Linnea Lueken:I mean, we watched inconvenient truth, like, 3 times, I think. I mean, we really it was, you know, 1 year after the next, especially around 2,007, 2,008. They were really pushing it pretty hard. Not entirely sure why. I think we might have been part of one of those, like, pilot programs where they were trying to inject climate into, like, every, part of the curriculum in every class.
Linnea Lueken:So that was interesting. And that actually is pretty much what, like, red filled me on the whole climate issue in the first place is because I you know, you can't even as a little kid, you're like, man, they are just they just do not shut up about this. They're talking about it all the time. There is something weird about it. But yeah.
Linnea Lueken:No. It's, it's Al Gore. I don't know I don't know what you want me to say, Tim.
Jim Lakely:Well, I mean, he's been
Stan Goldenberg:on made 100 of 1,000,000 of dollars.
Linnea Lueken:They they just Tomorrow go on TV and say, I predict that Hawaii is going to explode by Friday. And then when it doesn't happen, no one will call him on it. So what he says is totally irrelevant.
Speaker 5:According to Gore, there should be no ice at the North North Pole right now. There should be no ice on Kilimanjaro. Tennessee should be burning up. It's just one lie after another. And and most importantly, look, we toss around we we often hear the media toss around the word unprecedented, which means never happened before, Never previously.
Speaker 5:But then Gore goes on to say it's unprecedented. Well, they're having a storm that's once in a 1000 years. Well, that means a 1000 years ago or sometime within the last 1000 years it happened. Namibia, unprecedented drought. False.
Speaker 5:Even within human memory, they've had serious, dangerous, deadly droughts in Namibia. Portugal, wildfires never happened. False. I mean, he says it. No one you know, it's like if it was a presidential debate and he were a Republican, they'd be fact checking his stuff.
Speaker 5:But when he says it, no one fact checks him. They just nod their heads and go, oh, yeah. You're right. It's unprecedented. Portugal's never had wildfires before.
Speaker 5:Oh, drought never occurred in Europe before. Look. These stones in the rivers. You can see them, and it it and they're marked up showing when the last drought will hold it. If the stones are in the rivers and they have the markings on them showing 3 or 4 times in the past that you've had droughts like this, then it's not unusual or unprecedented.
Jim Lakely:Yep. Well, that is that is true. And, like I said, they get it. We just wanted to highlight it because it's always, every once in a while, he's kinda like the groundhog. He comes out of a hole and, spouts climate alarmism, and then he gets another $100,000,000.
Jim Lakely:So that's kinda how that works. Alright.
Speaker 5:At least the groundhog's right about half the the time. I I can never find, an instance where he's been right. So
Jim Lakely:Well, that's very good point. Alright. Let's move on to our our next one. This one is, is something that, I really think I can't actually can't even believe we have to address this. And this is the idea that, humans are able to manipulate either the creation, strength, and even direction of a hurricane.
Jim Lakely:And this this idea, it's it's mind blowing. We talked about it last week, actually, on the show when it came to hurricane Helene, and this thing has been spreading like a a Portugal wildfire, I guess. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, was has been talking about it. She talked about it during Helene. She has posts on X about it.
Jim Lakely:She's doing it again here with with hurricane Milton. Alex Jones did an entire show on this. And like it or not, Alex Jones has millions and millions of viewers, and he has influence. Tim Pool, a millennial with a very popular show on YouTube, again, millions of views each week. Just, this morning, while preparing for this show, he he'd had a livestream that was titled titled geoengineered superstorms and government weather control, and there were 20,000 people watching it.
Jim Lakely:So, you know, this is,
Jim Lakely:you know, this is something we could maybe even do
Jim Lakely:a whole separate video, debunking this whole idea and produced and maybe we'll do that in the future. That's what we do here. That's what the climaterealism.com website that we produce is also for. You know, it's about the reality of weather and climate, and that's what we believe in and not junk science and lies, just what we're hearing on this. And so, actually, this morning, I I I, I just put in the words search terms on x of Milton manipulation, And I ended up getting a stream of unending, posts about how humans have somehow manipulated Milton, to to make it strike where it struck and to make it as strong as it was.
Jim Lakely:So, Anthony, I know this really, this really gets your goat as it were. So I wanna start with you on how, you know, how how do we debunk this? Where this is kinda crazy that this even even has gotten going.
Stan Goldenberg:Yeah. Okay. So let's take a look at here's the picture of hurricane Milton. Right? So, you know, it looks huge.
Stan Goldenberg:It looks monstrous throughout the entire Gulf Coast. There it is. Right? And, you know, people see that, and they look at the size of Florida compared to it, and they think, oh, no. It's just gonna totally devastate the state.
Stan Goldenberg:And but then there's the conspiracy theorists that get in there, and they think, well, you know, the government's pushing it into Florida for political reasons, for example, because they don't like gov governor DeSantis. Well, let's just wreck the state and prove him wrong about climate change. That kind of rubbish is out there. But here's the deal. Here's the real deal.
Stan Goldenberg:And when you look at the amount of energy involved associated with a hurricane like this let's go to the next slide. A fully developed hurricane releases heat energy at the rate of 5 to 20 times 10 to the 13th watts. That's 5 to 20 trillion watts, which is equivalent to 10 megaton nuclear bomb going off every 20 minutes. I mean, now just imagine. We're gonna be able to steer something like that, you know, with with HAARP or lasers from space or whatever.
Stan Goldenberg:No. The the disparity between the amount of energy in the hurricane and the amount of energy us puny humans can generate is is mind bogglingly different. It's just not we can't do anything with it. And, you know, when you look at the next slide and you see how much hurricane energy is released over its lifetime, Power of 10,000 nuclear bombs over its night lifetime with energy primarily coming from the heat extracted from the ocean waters. A typical hurricane can generate energy equivalent to 100 of times the total electric generating capacity of the planet.
Stan Goldenberg:And somehow, we're gonna take all that electricity and shove it into the gulf and make the hurricane do something, you know, on on the whim of the government. The absurdity is just mind boggling, and yet people believe this junk, unfortunately.
Speaker 5:I I no one on this podcast or this livestream distrust the government more than I do, critiques the elites more than I do. But, look, I follow the science. I've looked into stuff about geoengineering, and, and geoengineering is different from storm manipulation, by the way. People seem to be confusing that with regards to the hurricane. But I've looked into this stuff because I've been interviewed 3 times this week on the topic.
Speaker 5:It's, it's, it's foolishness, it's dangerous. We've got enough things to critique the government for, enough problems the world faces without following the lead of people wearing tinfoil hats saying, see, it's, the government again. They're killing people because, they want to force us to acknowledge climate change. The government has the megaphone on climate change already. They don't need hurricanes to make that case, and they couldn't make the case using hurricanes if they wanted to, or tornadoes or anything else for that matter.
Linnea Lueken:Well, on that point, Sterling, you know, if the government was or, like, if the Department of Defense or something was creating hurricanes or making hurricanes worse in order to attack Trump supporters in Florida, which is the predominant theory that was floating around x this past, couple of days. You would think that they would use this technology to show an increase in hurricane impacts in North America in order to back up the climate scam. You would think that the data would show an increasing trend in hurricane severity and frequency or tornado severity and frequency, but there is nothing like that in the data. So what what what's the point? They they they can use this technology anytime they want, but they use it only right now, and they've never used it before to try and juice the climate scare.
Speaker 5:Look at, you know, look, Texas. There's no state pretty much redder than Texas. We haven't gotten hit by a hurricane. Asheville, North Carolina, as far as I can tell, is as blue a place in the state of North Carolina as can be. So they're they're literally directing it to destroy their own people and their own voting base.
Speaker 5:I have a feeling that in Asheville, it's gonna be hard to vote, after the storms. So it's just it's mind boggling how serious serious people are taking this.
Jim Lakely:Yep. Stanley Goldberg, I know that this is a a topic that, you know, gets your goat as well, And you are the hurricane expert. You work for a government agency that, all you do full time is work on studying hurricanes, their history, their behaviors, you know, their barometric pressure, all of that stuff. So maybe you wanna, take a swing at addressing this idea that humans can somehow have a significant impact on anything dealing with a hurricane.
Stan Goldenberg:Well, first of all by the way, let me mention while I'm wearing this. I'm gonna throw it in. Tonight starts Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, but also this is the week commemorating the October 7th massacre. Someday you'll do a whole program on why the left hates Israel. But, but going back to hurricanes now, let me just say this.
Stan Goldenberg:I've studied hurricanes for over 40 years, flown into numerous hurricanes, studied worked with hurricane models, hurricane data, and I'm particularly an expert in hurricanes climate. That doesn't mean just anthropogenic climate change. That means fluctuations in climate. So this is what I do. This is what I study.
Stan Goldenberg:But I wanna jump if you can, can you get my slides up there? I did send you some. Number 5. I wanna show this one because this is a slide made by our former director, doctor Hugh Willoughby, many, many years ago. What are the impacts of a category 4 hurricane hits landfall?
Stan Goldenberg:So here, this one's coming from the east, whereas these other storms, you know, came from the west. And what do you get? See, this is normal hurricanes 101. You get and people might not be able to see everything on there, but you have the area of devastating winds, the area of less devastating winds, but still tremendous disruption as far as power down and trees down and things like that. Then you have the blue, that storm surge, the wall of water that comes in and ignites the coast.
Stan Goldenberg:And then you have inland flooding, which is what we saw, you know, with the copious amounts of rain, and especially, where do you really get the flooding? Hilly areas, mountainous areas. It was no shock to see what happened in North Carolina. We've had, by the way, hurricane Mitch hit, Nicaragua, Honduras. It was a cap 5, but when it hit the coast, it was only a cap 1, sat there for a couple days, mudslides, huge amounts of rain killed ten 1,000 people.
Stan Goldenberg:You had Hurricane Agnes, 1972. At that time, the costliest storm in US history, 50 deaths flooding in the hills of Pennsylvania. You had Floyd in 1999, 85 deaths, all sorts of the deadliest storms since Agnes, not from storm surge, but from the inland flooding and the rain. And so you have this, this normal stuff. And by the way, the other thing on that diagram, for those who can read it, are tornadoes.
Stan Goldenberg:These happen sometimes with hurricanes and with with, what storm are we talking about now? Milton. There was this band ahead of it that had heavier thunderstorm clouds than even around the eye wall. So I wanna go back to, by the way, slide number 1. Okay.
Stan Goldenberg:So I came in to where I work while they were still doing Project Stormfury. That would take a minute to focus on this, because the wild theories out there, I've never seen so many people do it, and I'm gonna give courtesy to those who are believing this stuff. I've seen some of the articles. I've seen a video from this guy, sounded like a total expert. He says almost like the man made climate change people.
Stan Goldenberg:This is undeniable, irrefutable, and very calmly showed all these charts and figures and things. And if I didn't know my stuff, I might have even believed him. So I understand why some people are buying into this, but that is not what the science is saying. So Project Stormfury, which was going on for decades, was a very careful project that attempted to to create an outer eye wall. So in other words, you have the worst storms in the eye wall.
Stan Goldenberg:It can be very relatively small. So what we do is we seed around that eye wall, trying to get those clouds to form and be more vigorous, and to choke out the smaller eye wall. And it was only hoping to reduce the winds by 10 to 20 miles an hour. This was not to destroy the storm, and it was abandoned in the early eighties because the theory behind it, we happen to be a reputable lab, and we believe the science when we see it, and through different measurements, we realize the theory you have to have what's called super cold water droplets, and and, and there was not enough to allow this to happen properly. And also the amount of natural variability we saw, which you go to the next slide, made it oh, well, this is how we see it.
Stan Goldenberg:So you have the inner eye wall, and then you're trying to get the outer eye wall, and then the inner eye wall falls apart. So go to the next slide. This is hurricane Allen, the first storm I ever flew, in 1980. It went from those that's a barometric pressure. So when it's low, the storm is stronger.
Stan Goldenberg:When it's higher, the storm is weak. It went from cat 5 to cat 3 to cat 5 to cat 3 to cat 5 to cat 3 and without us doing anything. And we realized that that it would be very hard even if we were successful to differentiate what we were doing from natural variability, which was so high. But it was also the super cool water droplets, and I was there when they wrote the rest in peace paper on Project Stormfury, said we are stopping this. I was in the lab.
Stan Goldenberg:They were doing all sorts of cloud seeding. It was a huge program. FACE Florida ocean Florida Atlantic cumulus I forgot that what it means, but they were doing all this kind of experiment. Top meteorologists from all over were there, and it was minimal success. I mean, they were very careful.
Stan Goldenberg:They don't just boast about the stuff. So if you go to the next slide. Now at the very bottom, we have an FAQ page, which for weather weenies, it's great to learn all sorts of stuff about hurricanes, and that's the website at my lab. But if you go down to, you know, attempts to stop a hurricane in its tracks, it shows all sorts of different things that people are suggesting how to stop hurricanes. But we've been suggesting you could nuke them, you can drag icebergs, you can, you know, moist this has all been thought about and talked about, absorbing material, many other things, and just like Anthony said, they failed to comprehend the size and the power of a storm.
Stan Goldenberg:When he talked about the electrical energy, it's estimated this is back of the envelope calculation, that the latent heat released in a hurricane in one day could power the electrical needs of the whole United States, not for an hour, not for a day, not for a month, but for 6 months. We're talking about massive massive you would drop a nuclear, power nuclear bomb in a hurricane and be like throwing a ladyfinger, for those who knows what that is, little firecracker, and the hurricane would just, you know, yawn. That would be about it. So, you can take the slides down. But but let me say this.
Stan Goldenberg:It unequivocally, all these things that people are saying that we are somehow steering them. Look, I was on the ground, you know, we're we're monitoring what's going on on the planes, and I watched 4 flights and what was going on. We're seeing the actual data come in. We know the people that are out there. We know they're not doing any hanky panky or whatever kind of weird stuff.
Stan Goldenberg:We're observing this stuff. We're not changing it. And, yes, people can think, especially with Carolina, they had to do something horrible. Remember a couple years ago with EAM that hit the, Southwest Florida coast? People were saying, yep.
Stan Goldenberg:The government's trying to get revenge on DeSantis by sending this, you know, storm in. They're not changing the hurricanes. Hurricanes happen. And you bounce back to the man made climate change, is that affecting hurricanes? It's like, I'm sorry.
Stan Goldenberg:The evidence is not there. There's models, there's runs, there's all these sorts of things, but those are models. The the kind of activity we're seeing now, we've seen in the past. We've seen different kind of things. Each catastrophe is a little bit different.
Stan Goldenberg:Each one's a little bit different. But this year, remember you had me on back in, what was it, August? You know, why is this season not busier, and did we blow our above average forecast? And I said, well, the season's not over yet, things have happened, and sure enough, it hit mid September, late September, and bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, we had huge amount of activity. That's not you always break records.
Stan Goldenberg:Whatever record you have, you can always break it. That doesn't mean it's something weird. Records are meant to be broken. So, yes, I do not believe anybody's going out there. I would love Anthony to address so called chemtrails.
Stan Goldenberg:That's where people come to me all the time and are are, you know, this is they're doing all this stuff up there and and, you know
Stan Goldenberg:Makes my head hurt every time I hear the word chemtrails.
Stan Goldenberg:I want you I want you to take a minute or 2 to address that. Do you mean the government is not putting all these chemicals in the air? What are those streaks we see in the air, Anthony? Don't you know what they are? I hear this all the time.
Stan Goldenberg:Tell us about tell us about, please.
Stan Goldenberg:Well, chemtrails are not what people believe them to be. They're simple things. It's just simply the combustion process in a jet engine. So we have oxygen and jet fuel. They go together in the jet engine.
Stan Goldenberg:They burn. When jet fuel, a hydrocarbon, burns, it releases carbon dioxide, and it releases water vapor. Now at altitude, when the temperature is minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit where these jets are flying, what happens to water vapor that's ejected from the back of the jet engine? It immediately freezes. And depending upon the, relative humidity of the atmosphere at that level, it may linger for a long time, you know, if the relative humidity is high.
Stan Goldenberg:But if the air is very dry, it might disappear or not even show up at all. And so and this can happen when they fly through different layers of the atmosphere. And people that look up in the sky and they see these jets flying along and there's this trail coming behind them and then it stops, well, their minds go immediately to there's a chemtrail switch on the cockpit, and they shut it off. No. It's just they went to a different pocket of air that was drier.
Stan Goldenberg:So and imagine the cons imagine how many people, would have to be involved to keep a secret like this. But, you know, anyway, it's just simply, ludicrous. But let's go to back to project storm fury if we can. You know, Stan was right. You know, they tried all kinds of different things, and there's a website that NASA or rather NOAA has, talking about this.
Stan Goldenberg:And they talk about what was project storm fury. You know? And they were trying to reduce the, intensity of hurricanes through a number of different methods. I mean, they tried cloud seeding. They they even considered putting nuclear bombs in the atmosphere, you know, all kinds of of schemes.
Stan Goldenberg:And I'm I remember very, very well in 1975, 76 when I was, at the meteorology department at Purdue, I asked one of my professors, well, what about dropping a nuclear bomb into a hurricane? He had the same reaction I had to hurricane. I mean, to the chemtrails. It's like, oh, every time I hear that, you know so it the the amount of energy in one nuclear bomb is minuscule compared to the hurricane. Let's go back to that slide that I had earlier in the broadcast where we talked about the amount of energy involved.
Stan Goldenberg:A hurricane releases an enormous amount of energy often compared to the power of 10,000 nuclear bombs over its lifetime. So imagine dropping 1 nuclear bomb into a hurricane at any given time. Yeah. It might make a blip, but it's not gonna change its path. It's not gonna cause it to disintegrate.
Stan Goldenberg:And it's the same thing with cloud seeding.
Stan Goldenberg:There's
Stan Goldenberg:just so much energy involved in these things. These things are behemoths. We can't really stop them.
Speaker 5:You know, there there might be one impact if you dropped a nuke in a in a hurricane, and that would be to scatter radiation.
Stan Goldenberg:Absolutely. Lots of fall. Right?
Speaker 5:Over over a broad a lot of fallout. And and
Stan Goldenberg:that doesn't seem like a
Speaker 5:good idea to me, regardless of its impact on on hurricanes.
Stan Goldenberg:And that's not a minor thing because a hurricane's like a chimney, and that stuff in the middle goes up and then out through the outflow and could cover 100, if not, 1,000 of miles. Yeah. Yep. So
Linnea Lueken:Right. And I and I wanted to point out too to our audience because I know that there's probably some people who have kinda fallen in with some of this stuff. You know, if if you don't have the, like, background information to under like, the physics information to understand why this stuff is improbable, it it would as Stan said earlier, it would be really easy to believe. But, you know, I see a lot of people pointing to things that are real, like cloud seeding seeding, like, patents for weather modification machines and and which I think is actually one of the worst arguments for the weather modification thing because there are literally patents for, like, time machines and stuff. So I I wouldn't I wouldn't base, I wouldn't base my opinions off of the existence
Stan Goldenberg:of patent. One of the time machines. Where can I get that?
Linnea Lueken:Yeah. I know. Right? And then there are experiments that have been done and are talked about in the media all the time, that are geoengineering experiments to try and scatter, like, chalk dust or silver or something into the atmosphere Right. In order to, reflect sunlight back to produce global cooling.
Linnea Lueken:That stuff is real, but it's not it's not anywhere near the same ballpark as changing the direction or increasing the intensity of a hurricane. And, Stan, I have a question for you because, I saw this pop up in in comments all over the place on the Internet. And I think that this is a case of people who shouldn't be giving, the alarmists, this, like, bone. A lot of people are saying that the reason why they think that this storm was created or modified by the government or whatever is because they say it went from a category 1 to a category 5 in, like, 12 hours. Can you explain why that, like, would or wouldn't be an indication that there's something fruity going on?
Linnea Lueken:Or is that rare? Is that something that's unprecedented? That's the question I have.
Stan Goldenberg:They're gonna bring me up somehow here. Yep. Okay. The it's called rapid intensification. And I have one of the top experts on rapid intensification, works right down the hall from me.
Stan Goldenberg:I'll throw out his name, John Kaplan, but, and also Mark Demerio, who I knew. And you records are made to be broken. And you have all the cat 5 storms that hit the United States were tropical storms less than about 60 hours before landfall, some even 36 hours before landfall. You have, cat 5, storm that hit, Acapulco. Was that last year, I think?
Stan Goldenberg:And suddenly revved up. Sometimes when they're smaller, and and Milton was very small when this happened. It got bigger later. When they're smaller, it can get its act together quicker, and all the conditions come right, it can rev right up. Also, one of the key things with understanding hurricanes and why I do not believe they're getting worse, they're getting more damage because more people build in harm's way, is that people don't understand the historical database.
Stan Goldenberg:And whenever I give a talk, like the talk I gave in Orlando, whenever I give a talk, I have to show how things have evolved on how we measure these storms. So if you look at the fact that the I know I'm giving you a long answer, but this goes with everything else. If you know, I mentioned that since 1995, we've been in a high activity era, and we've had good satellite data. Well, that's the first time we ever observed a high activity era. And these eras have 2 to 3 times as many major hurricanes.
Stan Goldenberg:Those are the ones with rapid intensification. So we never observed those. And the aircraft data back in the previous act high activity area, which ended in 1970, even the aircraft data wasn't near as good as we have right now. And it keeps changing and changing. I've watched it in my 40 year career, you know, almost like coming out of the stone age compared to what we have right now.
Stan Goldenberg:So that's the thing. When they say I I hate when they say, this is the strongest hurricane ever in the Atlanta. That's never true. It's the strongest hurricane measured by some parameter. So there might have been a stronger one before.
Stan Goldenberg:The 1935 Labor Day storm, which was 895 millibars, cat 5 storm that hit Florida Keys, They had just a few barometric pressure measurements and the damage. Then you had Dorian a few years ago, and that was flown more than any hurricane we've ever had in history by all sorts of sophisticated instruments. So we really knew how strong that was. Same with Milton. We were out there dropping all sorts of instruments.
Stan Goldenberg:They dropped a, an unmanned drone, which flies near the surface. This is some of the latest technology, flies around, measures some of the strongest winds right near the surface. We're dropping all sorts of instruments. And by the way, we also dropped the ashes of a dear colleague of ours, burial at sea, during Milton, Peter Dodge, but that was a very tearful moment. That's we have emotional things too on the plains, and, he was very well known.
Stan Goldenberg:But the point is we're measuring this stuff like we've never measured before. So I can look back on busy years before and know we don't know even exactly how strong some of the storms were. So Yeah. Does that answer your question? Long answer, but it has to do with other stuff we've been talking about.
Stan Goldenberg:100%. Yeah. We just brought up a slide here that from Chris Marks on Twitter. And just look at the at the central pressures of these landfalling hurricanes and, you know, where, Helene is. It's number 8.
Stan Goldenberg:And, Milton, down at number 19. So, you know, these the Labor Day storm, Michael and Andrew, and the Florida Keys, and the Okeechobee storms were much more powerful, and they happened a long time ago except for Michael. So, yeah, there's the intensification just isn't there. It's not in the data.
Jim Lakely:Yeah. Well, let's let's talk let's break down Milton a little bit more here, while we have the time here. And, there's a if you can bring up that other, ex post, Andy of, like, 2 idiots on CNN, Anderson Cooper and Bill Weir, reporting from the ground, reporting from the ground there in Florida, getting blown around. Our friend Ryan Maui, you know, calls this cartoonish coverage, and that it certainly is as it get blown around. But, you know, this is why Astro theater.
Jim Lakely:That's exactly right. So this is why it's so great to have, Stan as a friend and on the show and Anthony as well as a meteorologist. But, let let's talk a little bit about the idea that the hurricane was getting so powerful so quickly in the gulf, as Linea brought up. You know, it even made a meteorologist on camera in Florida, you know, break into he almost cried because he couldn't believe how strong the storm was getting. And they said they said, guys, that we needed a new category now, a category 6 hurricane, to describe this storm.
Jim Lakely:And then, of course, the parade of more powerful storms that will now be routine, in the Atlantic and in the and in the gulf. But, Anthony, as you were looking into this, it may not be it may not be the case, and you and Stan can speak to this, that Milton was a, quote, unquote, major hurricane, which is cat 3 or above when it actually made landfall.
Stan Goldenberg:Yeah. Before we get to that, I wanna say one thing. Just watching Stan's reaction and mine earlier, I think this show has a record for the number of face palms in it.
Jim Lakely:For sure. Some of this stuff is just hysterical.
Stan Goldenberg:Alright. So here's one of the things that I've noted, and several other people have noted, like Ryan Maui and Chris Marks and other folks, that when the, NHC issues a, maximum sustained winds in their, in their reports yeah. For example, they said, Milton reached landfall as a cat 3 hurricane with a 120 mile per hour sustained winds. That's just 9 miles per hour over a cat 2. But when you look at the data on the ground, you look at the weather stations that were measuring wind speeds, we were seeing wind speeds when it made landfall of 70, 80, 90, maybe just a tad over a 100 miles per hour.
Stan Goldenberg:And so one of the things that is a concern is, n h c is out there reporting, you know, cat 3, but the reality is something like cat 1 to cat 2. And so that builds up a mistrust with people. And I think it'll have to do with the fact that, you know, they're looking down at this on by satellites, and they're looking at the rotation, and they're measuring the velocity from that. They're measuring the velocity from the hurricane hunters, which are inside the eye where it's gonna be maxed, but they're also measuring at altitude. Winds at altitude are much stronger than winds at the ground due to friction.
Stan Goldenberg:And so, Stan, how do we deal with that? How do we get a more accurate presentation to the public that really represents what this hurricane is gonna do when it makes landfall?
Stan Goldenberg:Let me make an important quote. I'm glad you asked that question. And I happen to be looking at the aircraft data from the ground. There was a number of us on a Google Meet, interacting with the airplane, seeing all the data even up to landfall. We were watching as it was made landfall, which thankfully have weakened.
Stan Goldenberg:And from you saying this, I am actually going to shoot this to the hurricane center and encourage them to emphasize this point. When they say the max winds by the way, we are measuring at the surface. We're dropping drop signs, and it measured that started in 1997. Before that, we didn't have that. So they're literally measuring it right at the surface, and they know what they're doing.
Stan Goldenberg:We're very experts with these instruments. It means somewhere at the surface, 10 meter height, there are 1 minute sustained winds of a 120 miles per hour. What needs to be communicated to the public more is not everybody's gonna get those winds. And, of course, as soon as it moves on to land, this is when it made landfall. It's at not Sebastian.
Stan Goldenberg:What was the key? Right there at the coast. The sorry. I just saw what they put on the screen. Disgracting.
Stan Goldenberg:But, but the point is that somewhere, there were those winds at the surface. But it starts to weaken as soon as it moves over land, and not everybody gets that. So they need to communicate that. Thankfully, everybody doesn't get it. Now let me say one other thing.
Stan Goldenberg:Hurricane Center is a very honest operation. They will do post analysis. They'll pull back all the data together and look over it again. In a few months from now, they might decide, you know, it was really a 105 miles per hour of landfall. Or with hurricane Andrew, 10 years later, they upped it from cat 4 to cat 5 looking at all the data.
Stan Goldenberg:So Katrina, they dropped it from a 4 to a 3 at landfall. I mean, there's all these things going on, but they're doing the best they can, and we certainly saw winds of that intensity as it was making landfall, from the aircraft surface measurements. Does that help answer the question?
Stan Goldenberg:Yeah. But, one other thing I wanna address with you, Stan, since I've got you on here and you're gonna talk to the people at NHC about it is I've had a number of comments on Twitter, Facebook, and so forth from people that are looking at the graphics, the warning graphics, for example, the static tone graphic that are produced by NHC. And they say, well, this is almost useless because I can't it doesn't have the level of granularity for me to determine where this is at, you know, compared to where my town is. And so what I was doing is I was downloading the, the Google Earth file, the the keyhole markup language KMZ file, and overlaying that, you know, on Google Earth. And I was able to determine for a lot of people where the track really is gonna likely be and how close it's gonna be to their town, and people were relieved about that.
Stan Goldenberg:But, it seems to me and and I'm not trying to fault NHC because I know change is difficult. But it seems to me that in terms of producing relevant and useful graphics, n h c is behind the times by about 10 to 15 years in their presentation to the public. What do you think?
Stan Goldenberg:Okay. Let me defend the folks at n h c. They add graphics. In fact, they just added a new one. If you go to the cone, above it, it says experimental cone, meaning they're looking into it, which is showing the warnings and watches inland.
Stan Goldenberg:It's an excellent product. I'm excited. They have all sorts of great products, but because their products are viewed by so many people and media, they have to do it extremely carefully when they do this, so it's not misunderstood. I happen to agree with you that I wish the map had more resolution. I did this I pulled up a Florida map.
Stan Goldenberg:I wanna know which cities were where. I was trying to figure it out, and there's nothing on that. They might have their reasons for it, but, there's they have a, PDA, Republic Service PSA, on their main page that gives you a video talking about the cone. I mean, they really try and communicate and educate the public, but there's so much misinformation out there. They have to fight it all the time.
Stan Goldenberg:And just like people see the cone, and that's not the edge of where the hurricane is gonna affect people. That's just the edge of where they think the track might be, but it can go out a 100 miles from that. So there's all sorts of hurricane 101 that we need to educate the public on. That's what you're here for, Anthony.
Stan Goldenberg:Yeah. Thank you, Ken.
Stan Goldenberg:But I'm gonna mention that map thing to them. I was like, can't you put a few cities on there something if we were have a have a version with all the cities on it? I would Yeah.
Stan Goldenberg:You know, one of the things that here's one of the things I would recommend. If you wanna keep that same map format for the static cone, just make it super high resolution and then, you know, offer a small thumbnail version on the website. Then people can click in it, and when it expands, it's much greater resolution, and they can see more detail. I think that would be tremendously useful to the public. Right now, it's just these low resolution graphics, and it's not really as useful as it could be.
Stan Goldenberg:Yeah. Very seriously, I don't work at NHC, but I know the people there, and if you email me your suggestions, I because some of those are good suggestions. By the way, let me mention one thing so I don't forget about hurricane Helene. I happened to be flying into Greenville, the South Carolina, the day the storm passed through that area. It had already gone, and I was there, thousands of trees down.
Stan Goldenberg:I saw a house half smashed by a tree, power out for 3 days. We were just an hour south of the horrible flooding. But what are the other reasons that flooding happened up there? Again, not man made, but what happened is there was this trailing thing just like with Milton. You saw all that rain ahead of the storm for 100 and 100 of miles, maybe in 5 100, 700 miles ahead of the storm.
Stan Goldenberg:And while I was interacting with front, that's what was going on with Helene. For days before the storm even got there, they were having a lot of rain. So the ground was supersaturated. And then and in fact, that's what happened with some of the others where one hurricane comes in, totally saturates everything, and then another hurricane comes in a week or two later, and you have the massive flame. But that's what happened in Carolinas combined with the fact that there's mountains.
Speaker 8:So thank you. Go ahead.
Jim Lakely:Good point. Alright. Well, we got we got a lot of questions to get to, and we're, we're already over time a little bit. We're gonna get to that, but as, Linnea prepares to, pick out the questions to ask, we have a, we didn't do our meme of the week here, our cartoon of the week. And so this is from, Scott Adams, robots read news.
Jim Lakely:And it's, recent hurricanes are being blamed on climate change or possibly government geoengineering. Robot raised news say ridiculous. Or possibly a 2020 change in maritime fuel standards that caused warming in the gulf or maybe exhaust from UAPs. That's nonsense and conspiracy theories. Other possible causes are the Cuban bean festival and racism, oh, and all of Trump's words.
Jim Lakely:Only a science denier would disagree with all of that. So a little levity before we get into the q and a.
Stan Goldenberg:That is great. It,
Speaker 8:Anthony.
Stan Goldenberg:Yeah. This the case of truth is stranger than fiction.
Jim Lakely:It in this case, this this week, I think it is. Alright. Linnaeus, q and a time. Let's, let's hit it.
Linnea Lueken:Alright. Awesome. I have a couple of comments in here related to weather modification that I tagged along with the questions just because these are common claims that I see online And because I do not have the background to understand where they're right and where they're wrong or how they're extrapolating this into ridiculousness or if they might be onto something, I did tag some of them so that we can address them because I think Anthony in particular will have answers for the radio frequency question, which is this individual says that weather is electrical, so radio frequencies can change weather physics in an instant. True or false?
Stan Goldenberg:False. False. Way false. Look. Stan's laughing.
Stan Goldenberg:But, you know, I understand people coming in with these ideas. I get it. I I understand you wanna make sense of all this stuff, but the reality is is that you cannot modify the weather significantly with radio waves. It just there there's just no interaction. And the vibrational, modes of water molecules are not in the regular radio frequency spectrum, you know, like AM broadcast, FM broadcast, that sort of thing.
Stan Goldenberg:They're up in the microwave band. And so but even then, if we shot microwaves into the sky, we were already doing that with radars, and we've learned to avoid, sending out radar waves at the frequency at which water molecules vibrate. Because what happens is that the radar becomes useless. So we don't really excite the atmosphere or change it with radio waves. It's just not happening.
Stan Goldenberg:Let me give you a quote. This is a quote by Thomas Huxley. The great tragedy of science, the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact. And we deal but we deal that all the time with our lab. These things aren't ridiculous.
Stan Goldenberg:Some people are thinking of reasonable stuff. Why can't we do this? Why can't we do it was a whole project storm fury. That was one of the most carefully thought out scientific experiments we've done on a large scale like that. And it's and but why did it finally stop?
Stan Goldenberg:Because we finally collected an update and saw enough things that, you know, it was slayed by an ugly fact, you know, and and that's you know, radio waves will try pointing mega radio waves at a bolt of lightning and see if you can change it. Okay? I mean, we're talking about things, and nothing out there can do any major stuff to the weather. Nothing man made right now can do that, even the cloud seeding. You're not talking about major changes.
Stan Goldenberg:Go ahead. Next Just
Stan Goldenberg:remember, we're uni humans.
Linnea Lueken:Yeah. Kind of related is the Nexrad thing. I've seen people claiming that Nexrad is, able to be used in this for this purpose. What's Nexrad?
Stan Goldenberg:Alright. So let me tell you about radar. This is what most people don't understand. They think that radar is a continuous beam of 750,000 watts going out, frying the atmosphere every time it's it's sweeps around. No.
Stan Goldenberg:It uses a pulse repetition rate, and the pulses are in the microseconds, of of duration. And so it'll pump out a 750,000 watt pulse. You know, that's a microsecond or 2 wide, and it does that listening for an echo. And so the amount of power dissipated over time is actually quite small because of that.
Linnea Lueken:Thank you, Anthony. Alright. This one is another on the same, in the same category that I think so I'm gonna pitch to Sterling because I, I recall that he had something to say about this. LT Oracle of Truth says John Brennan, director of the CIA, said that in 2015, he was very interested in solar radiation management that would mimic a volcanic eruption to cool the planet. I've seen these videos going around a lot.
Speaker 5:Yeah. That's one of the things that brought up to me in a radio show this week. They sent me the video. It's like, you know, my first thought, I don't like to attack a person, but rather their argument. But this is John Brennan.
Speaker 5:He was the lead spook for the United States, which means part of his job was lying for a living. He pushed the Russian dossier that we know is all false, and so why would anyone trust what he has to say about, climate modification? But what he talked about was putting basically, sulfates into the air, sulfur, particles, and he said, like, mimicking volcanoes, and that was to reflect sunlight to cool the earth. That wasn't to control hurricanes or any storms. It was simply to basically put a blanket of pollution into the air to cool the earth.
Speaker 5:This is one of those geoengineering things they keep bringing up. Now we did that for 80 years. It was called coal fired power plants. They we actually got a benefit from it. They were producing energy, reliable energy, but they put sulfates into the atmosphere.
Speaker 5:Now we put scrubbers on them, and we cut down that a lot. You know, they they they were producing acid rain, so we cut down that a lot, but they were still operational. Now we have removed that when we shut down the power plants. We've removed it from the shipping fuel, which is one of the reasons the surface of, the ocean has warmed, recent research suggest. The point is we could go back to coal plants and and let them let them spew the stuff into the atmosphere, and we wouldn't have to pay $10,000,000,000 of taxpayer money every year to do it.
Speaker 5:But that has nothing to do with weather modification. It's a geoengineering solution for what I think is a non problem, climate change.
Linnea Lueken:Thank you, Sterling. Okay. So this is a question that's kind of part of a series of questions from Luke Starkenberg, and he wants to know where does this misinformation come from, and, also, why does it seem like Republicans are primarily the ones who believe in this kind of, like, chemtrail geoengineering stuff? My answer to that would be, I actually don't well, it might actually be primarily people on the right, but I have seen people on the left pushing this stuff too, generally in the, like, hippie anti development kind of area. But what do you guys think?
Stan Goldenberg:I also have something to do
Stan Goldenberg:with mistrust of the government in general, which has been on the increase. People mistrust the government to do something in their best interest these days, and that has been increasing for the last 40 years. And so when we see these kinds of events happen, they think that, well, the government is doing this to us to punish us. That that's some of the thinking.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Remember, so in the sixties early seventies and before, it was the left that mistrusted the government. They they they they mistrusted the man. They said we gotta keep an eye on them. You know, during the during the Vietnam War, you know, the Tuskegee experiments, the LSD experiments that John Brennan's CIA carried out.
Speaker 5:So it's just shifted. It's it's mistrust of the government. I think the right always mistrusted the government some, but as the government has grown into ever more areas of our lives, telling us who can use what bathroom, telling us your children aren't yours if we decide you're not, affirming their gender, telling us that, well, yeah, people crossing the border are breaking the law, but we won't call them illegal, and we're gonna give them a pathway to citizenship. Basically, people on the right say, you're breaking the law. You're interfering with our traditional, exercise of authority, and so they distrust the government more right now.
Speaker 5:But you're right. There are a lot of people on the left that believe this stuff too. I I hear about contrails from people on the left and right.
Stan Goldenberg:Okay. Let me let me mention a couple comments to that. Number 1, the old Joseph Goebel quote, if there's propaganda person, if you repeat a lie enough, people believe it, and you will even come to believe it yourself. But the issue is that because of the Internet, because of social media, these things get repeated thousands and thousands and thousands of times. You see it.
Stan Goldenberg:Other people share it. We you know, I deal a lot with, promoting inspirational films, and there was a film that a woman went to one of the screenings, posted some negative stuff about it, which was very distorted. It got picked up, shared something like 50,000 times, and it really affected the revenue of that movie, and it was misinformation. So that stuff gets repeated. Also, like you said, the distrust of the government, and this is the other key thing.
Stan Goldenberg:People are shocked by disasters. And you see all this stuff again and again and again, people gasp at the destruction in North Carolina. They're shocked at what happened with Katrina. They're shocked even at this one. People get shocked at that, and they want a reason Why are we suddenly seeing this disaster?
Stan Goldenberg:People like me or historians that have worked in the field are not shocked by it. We're saddened, but we're not shocked. We believe these things can happen. Hurricanes happen. But that is the other reason.
Stan Goldenberg:It's hard for people to comprehend how bad things can be, like, with these hurricane. Yeah.
Stan Goldenberg:That and social media has become the great amplifier of lies and disinformation.
Linnea Lueken:Yeah. And like we were I think someone in the chat said before, you know, the the interesting and fun cool ideas, whether it's the space lasers causing fires in Hawaii or the government manipulation of the hurricanes or whatever, that's way more interesting than we had a bad storm. And so people will elevate that stuff.
Stan Goldenberg:Now now the thing is not that they're causing the stuff, but how they're responding to the disasters like in Hawaii, how they're responding to the disaster in North Carolina. And comment after comment came from people on the ground, how they were being resisted on certain private efforts, and how FEMA, as we've heard, was doing so little. The point is some of that stuff is real, but the cause behind the disasters is not. And we have to, disasters happen, and we have to prepare ourselves for it.
Linnea Lueken:Stan, this is for you. We're I'm gonna shift us back onto the hurricane, specific topics. But LT Oracle of Truth asks, the reverse storm surge amazed me. What factors occurred to cause that phenomenon?
Stan Goldenberg:Oh, that's a great question. I I I assume they're talking about Tampa Bay.
Linnea Lueken:Yeah.
Stan Goldenberg:And, yeah, what hap oh, you you got my juices going even just talk about it was not really that I was thinking about. Rospirone.
Linnea Lueken:It is nice. Excited when I saw this question too because it's really cool.
Stan Goldenberg:This is this is the first time I've been so involved in some of the flights. I wasn't doing any measurements. I wasn't processing anything, but I was just observing. So I was on the meet and and, you know, I've done it so much in the past on the plane. This is the first time on the ground like this.
Stan Goldenberg:So I was watching everything, and we're watching very carefully how is it going to hit Tampa Bay, because that is the disaster disaster waiting to happen. Because if it would be slightly to the south, then I'm sorry, to the north, then the winds would be onshore. Therefore, pushing all the water in up into those bays and inlets, it would be just a mega disaster. But if it's a little bit to the south like it was, they get offshore winds, So it pushes the water out and you get this negative storm surge, but when the storm passes, then the stuff comes sloshing back. And I've seen actually storm surge models that show different scenarios, storms hitting different directions, and they showed one where this after the storm totally left, then the back storm surge happened.
Stan Goldenberg:So the direction whereas the East Coast of Florida was getting mainly onshore winds. So they were getting a decent amount of surge and south of the storm, down towards I forgot some of those cities down there, but, you know, the you know, south of the storm, they were getting onshore winds and they were getting but that's that's a great question because Do you know how far they're pushing it out?
Stan Goldenberg:Well, before we get off of that
Stan Goldenberg:I just know it went down a few feet. I don't know exactly how far I haven't studied it. I I've had my hands so full the last few days. I don't know what day it is. I thought yeah.
Stan Goldenberg:Before we get off of this subject, I wanna point out that my, my, guy Friday, Charles Rotter, for what's up with that, he lives down in, along the East Coast around near Miami. Right. Right. That's right.
Stan Goldenberg:That's right.
Stan Goldenberg:Yeah. And he was reporting that even at low tide, there was, you know, some flooding going on. And he was baffled by this, and I said, well, it's most likely and back me up on this, Dan, if I'm if I'm right or wrong. But most likely, it had to do with once, Milton went off to sea, it created a a bulge of water that it was sucking up, you know, due to the low pressure. And then as it moved further away, that bulge relaxed, and then you got this wash of water coming up a core against the coast.
Stan Goldenberg:Is that right?
Stan Goldenberg:I don't know in this particular case. Remember, I'm a careful scientist with this, so I'm careful what I say. But it is when you have a storm out at sea, like, for instance, you had, Kirk, was it Kirk, like, a week or 2 ago? It was a massive hurricane, and it didn't get near land, but it generated huge swells all along the eastern coast of the US. So you have a hurricane, whether it's the bulge relaxing and going or just simply the the stuff generating out from the hurricane.
Stan Goldenberg:You have a lot going on with the oceans, with these things. And, by the way, the reason they beg people to evacuate, they have to hope for the best but prepare for the worst, is because the hardest thing to escape is the flooding. Whether it's storm surge flooding, which can come in very quickly and rise several feet, like, you know, you just kinda blink and it's coming up, and it's hard for people to get away from, or the inland flooding, you know, from the copious amounts of rain like in the mountains and things like that. Flooding is is the deadliest part of the storm. It's easier to hide from the winds than it is from the flooding.
Stan Goldenberg:This is great. Go on. Good question.
Linnea Lueken:Yeah. This question from, Itisito. I don't know. I hope I pronounced that right. I probably didn't.
Linnea Lueken:Who says, why do hurricanes lose energy above land?
Stan Goldenberg:Oh, that's great. That's these are really good questions. Kudos. Because the source of the enemy, as we've been say source of the energy, we've been saying, is the latent heat released. For those who don't know what that is, that's when the moisture in the air rises and it cools off, the the water vapor condenses.
Stan Goldenberg:And when it condenses, it releases what's called latent heat of condensation or evaporation. So the energy that drives that hurricane is the water vapor that they get from the ocean. As soon as you get over land, you not only have friction, more friction on the ground, which can slow the winds down, you cut off its source of energy. That's exactly it. Occasionally, when something like went over, Andrew went right over the Everglades.
Stan Goldenberg:So hurricane Andrew came from the east, went over the Everglades, and weakened very little. It came out as a cap 3 on the other side, because there was a lot of moisture there. But you gotta have that warm ocean to fuel the hurricane.
Linnea Lueken:Thank you very much. You're gonna like this one too. Let me I just lost it. What? Hang on.
Linnea Lueken:Oh, yeah. When you say airplane wind speed measurement, how is that done? Seems like 10 feet off the ground is pretty close.
Stan Goldenberg:I get so much laughing done at on these forums. Well, but that's right. What happens is the official surface wind speed is defined as 10 meters off the ground, which is 30 feet. It's actually a little slighter less right near the ground. What happens is in the old days, we would fly the plane and we had an equation that we would reduce the winds at flight level because like Anthony said, they're higher at flight level.
Stan Goldenberg:So say we're flying at 5,000 feet, so we multiply 0.7 times the winds to estimate what was going on the surface. But starting in 1997, we started using, GPS drop wind signs, and these things are amazing stuff. I was on the first flights they were ever launched into a hurricane, and they go down, and they can measure all the way to the surface, very accurately the wind. So that's how we know what's going on surface. We also have something called the microwave microwave scattorometer.
Stan Goldenberg:The NOAA p 3 aircraft are some of those heavily instrumented aircraft in the world with lots of professionals out there. By the way, I wanna say publicly kudos to all the people involved. I was not on the plane. I was on the ground. The the crew and the scientists on the plane and the National Hurricane Center doing their job, and National Weather Service people getting out the word.
Stan Goldenberg:I mean, the people at the Hurricane Center day and night, and they've got such pressure because lives are at stake, and they take that very seriously. So you can send up an appreciation to them. But that's how. So we actually have measurement, and the scatter wave scatter microwave scatterometer actually measures winds at the surface from the ocean condition. And we use the dropsondes, and they compare things to each other to get the measurements.
Stan Goldenberg:We have all sorts of ways we actually let me tell you, in the old days, in the forties, fifties, when they were flying, how did they measure the surface wind speed from the plane? They had a little transparent bubble underneath the plane. I know someone who flew in that on Navy planes, and they would look at the ocean surface, and they would estimate how strong the winds were by looking at the oceans. So there's all sorts of charts. And by the way, why we don't trust some of the old measurements?
Stan Goldenberg:This guy would say, come back as commanding officer would say, no. It can't be that strong. I think not the winds down. So all sorts of ways to measure. Thank you.
Stan Goldenberg:Great questions.
Linnea Lueken:Awesome. Okay. This is a question I'm gonna throw at pretty much everybody what they think about it. And that is from Slarter Bartfast who says, is the hurricane manipulation narrative a deliberate disinformation, campaign to pooh pooh the climate deniers? And what I what I would say to that is that I I find it very bothersome on when the right is parroting the, like, unprecedented language when it comes to these storms in order to push the idea that the government is manipulating the weather.
Linnea Lueken:I saw, the blaze, for instance, was pushing the idea that, weather is becoming more erratic and unpredictable. And they say and it's because weather manipulation.
Jim Lakely:No. I'm gonna I'm gonna jump right in.
Stan Goldenberg:Yeah. Yeah. I'm gonna jump right in just because I've been looking at this so much and dealing with so many people with this because I'm hurricane person, so they're all coming to me. And and that is, I don't think they're related. I think the distrust of the government is the key factor, but it's this very slick.
Stan Goldenberg:The the file I sent you, with the video, you can look at later. If you watch it, you'll see why so many people are convinced. And I had a dear friend in in Hollywood. He's a smart guy, and he wrote me. When I told him it was garbage, he said I was fooled.
Stan Goldenberg:And this stuff is so, so slick. And some of these people, we don't know. I have a saying. You can watch someone's actions. It's another thing to know their motives.
Stan Goldenberg:Why these people are doing it, whether they believe it or they're deliberately deceptive, I don't know. But there was an article, and they used our FAQ page, which I put on that on that slide. They used their FAQ page to show why this is not true that this stuff is happening. So it's a real good article about it. They said, but the ocean temperatures are getting warmer, due to climate change, and therefore, that's making hurricanes stronger.
Stan Goldenberg:So they they dismiss one thing and then embrace the other thing. So go ahead. I don't know if anybody else has something on this.
Speaker 5:Well, I wanna say, it's it's also I think it's broader than climate change. It's, it's something that's maybe ingrained in the human genes. I don't know. It's fear and misunderstanding of of new technologies. People who grew up, when fossil fuels were dominant largely trust fossil fuels, and before they trusted chemicals as well.
Speaker 5:But now I see the same people who are putting up things about chemtrails and electromagnetic pulses that's usually from the left or not EMPs, but electromagnetic, from power lines causing cancer, that's usually from the left. You know, they're saying, oh, we gotta go organic food. We got gotta get rid of, chemicals are bad in food. Oh, we gotta gotta go all organic. And and they say, you can't trust biotechnology.
Speaker 5:So they're they're basically people on the right. Some people on the right have become the new Luddites. They like the technologies they understood, but they don't trust the technologies that are coming on. And I I I just see them so many of them saying just crazy things about look. Vaccines.
Speaker 5:Were there some iffy things about the vaccines that came in? Yeah. Yeah. There were. But you know what?
Speaker 5:I'm glad I got a polio vaccine. I'm I'm I'm I'm glad I I take my tetanus shots. I'm I'm glad that, I I I never got, the German measles. Vaccines that have been tested over the years are good, and you've got to watch the new ones, see if they're developed with new kinds of technologies, and then make a judgment for yourself. But don't suddenly question the whole idea of vaccines throughout history or technologies in in agriculture or all of these things.
Speaker 5:Just because they're new just because they're new doesn't necessarily mean they're bad.
Stan Goldenberg:It's called careful science. And let me put 2 quotes together. 1 is the Goebel quote that I mentioned. Goebel's, you repeat a lie enough, people will believe it. So this stuff is said some of it so many times.
Stan Goldenberg:And the other quote I first heard at a Heartland conference, it is far easier to deceive someone than to convince them they've been deceived. And once people start to grab hold of this stuff, it can be very hard to remove them from it. It really takes a lot of hard facts, and they have to trust, you know, trust them. And, but it's sad. That's why I really wanted us to talk, and I'm glad we did, about all these rumors going out there that were causing these horrible hurricanes.
Stan Goldenberg:Like, we've never seen these before. Yeah. That's the problem. It's man made climate change. It's it's weather modification.
Stan Goldenberg:It's like there's nothing new. This has been horrible. We just didn't have as much stuff on the coast in some areas and as many measurements.
Linnea Lueken:Right. And and I wanted to say too because, a family member of mine said this to me, and I I think this is probably true, which is that, you know, if the government could steer and create massive hurricanes, would they? And the answer to that, I think, is probably yes. But the fact that we don't see any trend that indicates that that's happening is pretty
Stan Goldenberg:could get rid of them, we would get rid of them.
Linnea Lueken:If we could I would
Jim Lakely:say no.
Speaker 5:No. No. No. If if we could control them, they'd be used in modern warfare. Hurricanes directed in modern warfare.
Stan Goldenberg:Listen. Let me let me tell you a true story. We used to fly, if we flew if we flew storms in the East Pacific, then we would fly usually from Mexico, Acapulco, Puerto Vallarta. I've been there a number of times. And at a certain point, Mexico wouldn't let us come there because they thought we were seeding the storms, are you ready for this, and moving them away from Mexico.
Stan Goldenberg:Why did they want the hurricanes? Because they need the rainfall. And I thought, boy, if we could do that, believe me, we'd be doing it in the US and steering these things away. What But wasn't that for go ahead.
Jim Lakely:No. Wasn't controlling the weather, the plot of a Bond film? Was it the world is not enough? Isn't it? The the idea was they're going to control the weather, and if they could control the weather, they could control the world.
Jim Lakely:I mean,
Stan Goldenberg:We've had a lot of those sci fi things recently. I mean and then there's Storm and the X Men. Yeah. Right.
Stan Goldenberg:Going to movies, I prefer to think of the whole geoengineering thing, like the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Who's working on geoengineering? Top men.
Jim Lakely:That's right. Top men.
Speaker 5:Before there was storm, there were witches that that brought rain or plague to crops. Remember, people have always, thought that supernatural entities could control or modify the weather.
Jim Lakely:Well, I think what I think the show has really done, and Anthony, especially, will stand, of course, as well, is, like, I don't think people can really comprehend the power of nature, and how puny humans and human activity is when it comes to the climate, like the power of c 02 to, you know, basically, as the control knob of of global temperature. That's just as false as the idea that that puny humans can somehow seed and and affect in any meaning in any even remotely approaching a meaningful way, a hurricane for crying out loud. People just really don't understand the the scope of, you know, our atmosphere, the scope of the earth, and the immense power of a storm like, you know, like Milton and all these other hurricanes. The I it should be dismissed out of hand by anybody that uses any logic that the that man's ability to manipulate something of that immense size of power is literally impossible. In fact, it wouldn't even be a plot of a science fiction film.
Jim Lakely:It's so absurd.
Linnea Lueken:It's kinda like it's kinda like looking and saying, like, okay. You can nuke a city. Therefore and this is the cloud seeding to the hurricane seeding idea. You can nuke a city. Therefore, you could nuke the sun and destroy it.
Linnea Lueken:Like
Stan Goldenberg:Yeah.
Linnea Lueken:Okay. Let's let's hit this question here from Albert, who's a good viewer of ours, and he has a good question, which is and I know that Stan is gonna love this one again. How bad was Milton compared to Andrew?
Stan Goldenberg:Oh, well, first of all, Milton was stronger than Andrew when he was out at sea. So WhitReach winds, actually, I don't know the the the flight I think some surface winds were up to a 180 miles an hour. So it was stronger than Andrew. It was very small like Andrew, but by the time it hit land, which we were hoping, it it weakened. So Milton, if it was a cap 3 at land, and, again, they'll know when the post process data, Andrew was a absolute cap 5.
Stan Goldenberg:And so Andrew, not only did some storm surge, but I should bring up my Andrew picture that, you know, it ripped I was in a concrete block house. It ripped the entire roof off, carrying the concrete timing, And, just did incredible devastation all over here from those kind of winds. So Milton wasn't anything like it. We've had some other cat fives that have hit areas. But by the way, Andrew was the only one that hit a major metropolitan area in all these cat fives.
Linnea Lueken:Yep. We've gone way over, so I don't think I can get to
Jim Lakely:more questions. So much more. About that, guys.
Stan Goldenberg:We always have
Jim Lakely:Yeah. Just Just just just
Stan Goldenberg:one so good.
Jim Lakely:Just one last question here, Stan. You could probably address this, you and Anthony, in in literally 30 seconds. But why did Milton basically evaporate as soon as it hit the Atlantic? Water temperature here in Northern Florida is around 78. Shouldn't that have, I guess, the assumption, shouldn't that have refueled the hurricane?
Stan Goldenberg:Oh, no. It had plenty it had plenty of warm water. There was what we call a a warm water eddy nearby. It was some dry air was coming in, so you have all these things going on the atmosphere. It was in an ideal situation near the Yucatan.
Stan Goldenberg:Then as it got closer, we saw there was a cold front coming down, there was some dry air coming in, and there was higher vertical shear. Vertical shear is the difference between the lower and the upper level winds, and when the difference is really strong, it rips the hurricane apart. So all those things combined to weaken it. Whereas, Andrew, as it approached land, everything got better for development, and it intensified to a campaign. So we're very glad this weekend.
Jim Lakely:And we're very glad today to have you on to have had you on the show, Stan Goldenberg, one of the great hurricane experts in the United States and and, frankly, the entire globe. Second time on the show, and I'm sure it will not be the last thing. This 3rd
Stan Goldenberg:time on the show. On the show. Yes.
Jim Lakely:Yes. 2nd time in the last few months
Stan Goldenberg:in her And it's always an honor to be on Heartland. I'll say that as well.
Jim Lakely:It's always great to have you on here, my friend. So, as that's we're just gonna wrap it up for today. I just wanna remind everybody to please like, share, and subscribe. And we had a very lively conversation among ourselves and with our audience in the chat. So if you have more things to add, you can leave comments.
Jim Lakely:That's a good place, to do that, and we will also read them as well. Please visit climate at a glance.com. We have a whole section on hurricanes that will give you a primer on just what you need to know as you observe these storms on your own. Go to climate realism.com. That is where the Heartland Institute debunks at least one b s mystery about the climate in the media every single day.
Jim Lakely:Visit what's up with that, which is that website run by our own Anthony Watts. And always go to heartland.org where you can subscribe to our Climate Change Weekly newsletter. Thank you, Stan Goldberg. Thank you, Sterling Burnett. Thank you, Anthony Watts.
Jim Lakely:Thank you, Linnea, and thank you to our producer, Andy Singer, in the background. And thank you all for watching, and we will talk to you next week.
Linnea Lueken:How dare you.