“Was It Global Warming When Stronger Hurricanes Hit the East Coast in the 1950s?” [updated]

The facts are clear: The 1950s had “a road map of destruction up the East Coast.” “This map speaks for itself.”

Chief Meteorologist for Weatherbell Analytics Joe Bastardi is sick of ill-informed commentary linking weather, SuperStorm Sandy, with climate.

“Was It Global Warming When Stronger Hurricanes Hit the East Coast in the 1950s?,” he asks.

It is frustrating to be out in front of the hurricane threat on the U.S. Coast, and then have people who either have not looked, or have, and are simply ignoring the facts, come in after the fact and make their claims. I have referred to these people as weather "voyeurs." They only look when it suits their purpose. In the private sector, our fight is every day, and the knowledge of the past and the reasons for the weather and climate are the foundations for any success in the future. A good meteorologist has to know his weather and climate history or he will fall prey to the whims of the computer models. Perhaps you saw some of that with Hurricane Sandy. Until the middle of the week before the storm, the U.S. generated model was taking the storm out to sea and there was denial in some circles that Sandy was going to come back and hit the coast.
    Of course, the usual suspects piled on the disaster train once it became obvious, to push their AGW agenda. They are nowhere to be found before the fact, but certainly come out of the woodwork after. I leave the reader to judge the tree by the fruit on it.

Yes, please do.

Here are a few reminders that will assure you that a storm like Sandy is well within the realm of what nature can, and in reality, should do, especially given the cycle we are in, which is very similar to the 1950s (cooling Pacific, with a still warm Atlantic)…

    You will have seen the chart above many times, but it does not get old, nor does the fact change that the earth is no longer warming, but CO2 is still going up. That chart should be enough to debunk the AGW idea on hurricanes since if the earth is not warming, it can't be warming that is causing more hurricane hits.
    The other problem is that there are not more hurricane hits -- the total global tropical activity is down! The Global ACE index (accumulated cyclonic energy) which gives us an objective way at looking at total global tropical cyclone activity, has tailed off to record low levels.
    So we have two objective measurements saying that:

            a.) The earth is no longer warming.
            b.) Tropical activity is not getting worse.

Interestingly enough, as if to teach a lesson to the Nobel Committee, the tropical activity started tailing off most strongly after Al Gore was awarded a Nobel prize for his movie An Inconvenient Truth. The actual Truth however is the opposite (which is inconvenient, though apparently largely ignored by Al Gore).
    But the irony grows even richer when one considers the fact that hurricane hits on the U.S. Coast were greatest when there was less CO2!
    In the end, blaming Sandy on Global Warming or "Climate Change" is … shockingly ignorant or shockingly deceptive. The facts are clear on this and not hard to see, if one simply looks!

He’s right, you know.

UPDATE:  Furthermore, even if you don’t buy the actual truth that the earth is no longer warming, or that the correlation between CO2 and hurricane activity is the reverse of that promoted by warmists, consider that you can't fix a hurricane with climate policy.

Whatever the truth of man’s role in global warming, whatever the merits of regulating CO2, making climate policy the answer to hurricanes can’t be anything but a fraud on the public. Doing so, literally, is like proposing to spend trillions to reduce by an inch or two an 11-foot storm surge that might occur sometime in the next century.