A calamity like the visited on those living in New Orleans attracts all kinds of intellectual salesmen, especially the ones whose arguments have lost out in the battle of ideas. When they see a tragedy like Katrina, they rush to take advantage and try to score points for their ruinous theories using the tragic images sent out by media combined with half-truths and complete lies. One group hurrying to make use of the moment is the radical environmentalists. Their message is clear: the catastrophe is due to our voracious free market economic system, in short, capitalism.    

 

Their most sophisticated argument would go more or less this way: “greenhouse gases are warming the planet. Such warming increases the average temperature of the oceans and this, in turn, serves as a breeding ground for more and bigger hurricanes.” Put this way, in the abstract, most scientists would admit it is not an impossible theory. The problem comes when anyone tries to test it. 

 

In Katrina’s case, we stumble on the first problem as soon as we take a glance at the historic series of hurricanes that have touched down in the United States. Between the beginning and middle of the 20^th century, a time when we might assume man produced relatively few greenhouse gases, there was a strong increase in destructive force hurricanes (category 3, 4 and 5 on the Saffir-Simpson scale), with the number of hurricanes doubling from 4 to 10. However, in the decades following the Second World War, when greenhouse gas emissions multiplied significantly, up to the end of the 1970s, the number of destructive hurricanes decreased from 10 to 4 while the total number of hurricanes steadily fell from 24 to 12. From then to now, there has been a slight rise in hurricane activity. Over the past decade, the number remained below the average for the 20^th century. Adding the 5 very forceful hurricanes, we have a total of 14 hitting US territory. The question any sensible person would ask is: where is the correlation between greenhouse gas emissions and a variation in the number or intensity of the hurricanes? The answer is quite simple: no correlation exists.    

 

This takes us to the problem of causality. Hurricane experts state these natural phenomena follow cycles, but say they know little about what triggers these cycles. The environmentalist hypothesis claims the main factor in these cycles is warming of ocean water. As we will see, this theory has serious problems, the first of which being the water where hurricanes form in the Atlantic (between the 5^th and 20^th northern parallel, running from Africa to America) has undergone a slight cooling in the last few decades. The staff at the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP) admits this fact when it writes “areas like the North Atlantic Ocean have cooled in recent decades.” But there is more. Despite a slight warming of the waters in other areas where hurricanes form, there has been no increase in number or intensity of these phenomena. There is no empiric evidence of a relation between gas emissions and frequency or intensity of hurricanes. Rather, the environmentalists’ theorical base has gaping holes in its most elementary reasoning.