A DIFFERENT POINT OF VIEW: Hurricane Idalia

Squalls out on the gulf stream
Big storm’s comin’ soon…

— from “Trying to Reason with Hurricane Season” by Jimmy Buffet, 1974.

There is a video available on Youtube of Paiute Indian tribal rangers clearing a reservation road road in Nevada of environmental protestors who were obstructing traffic.

What I found most interesting is that, as the rangers are taking care of business, you can hear one of the traffic obstructionists yelling “We’re environmental protesters!”

Apparently that self-anointed status justifies blocking a road, and immunizes them from legal consequences of their behavior.

That appropriate dose of “reservation justice”, administered by tribal rangers, stood out to me as I was also watching videos of the destruction of parts of my state by Hurricane Idalia.  So it’s time for the third of my (not quite) annual installments of “Trying to Reason With Hurricane Season”.

You can read the prior installments here.

This episode is being written the day I learned of the death of Jimmy Buffet (1946-2023) who died September 1. RIP Jimmy !

So what does the Paiute Indians arresting entitled “protesters”… and nature doing the same to parts of Florida… have in common?  The climate of course!  But not in the way petulant, grown-up children, holding their breath until they turn blue in the middle of public road, think it does.

Some members of my family were impacted by Idalia.  Fortunately they don’t live directly on the Gulf, so they did not feel the worst it. The beach of my hometown Clearwater was inundated from storm surge for the first time in my life.

Seeing videos of water covering Coronado Drive was surreal for me. I rode my bike there as a kid, and drove on it as recently as a month ago.

When I was riding my bike there, those high rises you see in the video didn’t exist. That’s the real ‘environmental’ tragedy.

From one of my previous Daily Post op-eds:

“As children we rode our bicycles across the causeway to the beach. Now the traffic renders that far too dangerous for local kids. The goal of Clearwater Beach tourism officials seems to be to become the next Miami Beach, though I don’t know why.”

The flooding resulted from a confluence of two simultaneous environmental phenomena: Hurricane-generated storm surge; and a “king” tide, which is a rare high tide occurring only during certain full moon phases. The surge hit just as the tide peaked.

The same combination resulted in the near total destruction of three small coastal communities 100 miles further north when Idalia made landfall in the Big Bend. Cedar Key, Steinhatchee, and Horseshoe Beach were inundated. Like me commenting about the Clearwater flooding, locals there say they had never seen such an event before, even during previous storms.

I’m familiar with all three of the coastal towns that got hit in the Big Bend. Unlike Clearwater Beach, they are a vestige of rapidly vanishing “old Florida”. Or they were. It remains to be seen if they will recover.

Idalia formed in the area where the Gulf of Mexico merges with the western Carribean. Hurricane that form there intensify more rapidly than those formed in the Atlantic.

The outflow of four major rivers on two continents — the Amazon and Orinoco from South America, and the Mississippi and Rio Grande from North America — apparently impacts ocean salinity, which contributes to the intensity of tropical storms in the Gulf of Mexico.

Cutting edge research gathered by the use of ocean-going drones provides new insight into the effects of salinity.

Apparently the volume of precipitation during the summer rainy season, added to the fresh water flowing from rivers, reduces the salinity of the surface water layer, which raises its temperature. Though not much of an increase, it apparently contributes to the cyclonic wind patterns that become tropical storms. Tropical storms then generate more rain, feeding themselves.

Idalia developed from a tropical storm to a Cat 2 hurricane rapidly, then to a Cat 3/4 even more rapidly than usual for hurricanes.

Ian did the same last year.

I heard one of the usual suspects among the environmental jihadists label Idalia “an unprecedented event” caused by “climate change resulting from human activity”. Idalia was hardly “unprecedented.”

A study of Gulf-formed hurricanes going back to 1932 reveals that, “Gulf-formed storms have three nasty characteristics besides forming close to us: they form early in the season, their forward speed often accelerates as they make landfall and, most troublesome of all, they often intensify as they make landfall.”

But environmentalists can’t let facts get in the way of alarmist propaganda.

I agree that “climate change” may contribute to the storm surge from Idalia that flooded the coastal areas — just as Ian did to Sanibel Island and Ft. Myers Beach last year. But not from the alleged man-made reasons environmentalists claim in order to further their dreams of running our lives.

All of what is now coastal Florida was once under water. The home where I now live, several miles inland from the Atlantic Ocean, was once the coast line.

I previously wrote: “Earth’s sea levels have been rising and receding for epochs, and will continue to do so. It’s a natural cycle that is out of our hands.”

Is the Gulf of Mexico beginning to reclaim the barrier island beneath man-made Clearwater Beach high-rises? Was Idalia nature’s way of accelerating that aquatic reconquista? Could be.

Considering how it’s changed from what I knew as a kid, I can’t honestly say that reclamation of the Clearwater barrier island, by the Gulf, from the corporate high-rises, would upset me. As Jimmy Buffet sang in Migration: “I wish a summer squall would blow them all away up to fantasy land…”

Unfortunately, that would also entail reclaiming the small “old Florida” coastal communities as well… and that would sadden me. Hopefully, they will be replaced on the new coastline by other remaining “old Florida” towns that are now inland.

Which brings us back to the environmental protesters learning a life-lesson from the tribal police on the Paiute reservation in the high desert of Nevada. They need to educate themselves about the environmental history of this planet we’re all spinning around on.

The planet will do just fine no matter what we do, or don’t do. Whether we humans survive — at least in this form — is another question that, in the grand scheme, really doesn’t matter to Mother Nature. Those who study such things are aware of four ‘mass extinctions’, as a result of changes in the environment, that have occurred during the existence of earth. The last one was when the dinosaurs got wiped out. Extinction of those giant lizards produced two significant benefits for us. First, since most of the biggest ones were herbivores that consumed a LOT of plant life to sustain their massive bulk, their disappearance enabled the flora to thrive. Second, killing off T-Rex and his fellow carnivores gave mammals a chance.

A few million years later, it was a 7-degree centigrade increase in average temperatures “in less than a decade” at the end (c. 9600 BC) of the ‘Younger Dryas’ period that probably lead human transition from hunter-gatherers into permanent villagers to pursue permanent cultivation. Dramatic ‘climate change’ ain’t necessarily a bad thing.

Also contributing to human cultivation of cereal grains as a reliable food source was an increase in atmospheric CO2 levels. It’s amazing what you can learn from actual data, instead of listening to “climate change” propaganda . (See After the Ice, by Steven Mithen)

The self-absorption of environmentalists enables self-delusion that planet earth needs them to save it. Well… I hate to burst their bubble… to keep on spinning the planet doesn’t need humans anymore than it needed giant lizards. Thinking otherwise is pure hubris. The planet will survive even if we “extinct” ourselves.

I think environmental protesters are stroking their own egos with a feeling of moral superiority — their goal being to impose their vision of society on the rest of us. Those protesters blocking the road on the Paiute reservation were certainly imposing their vision on people who were just trying to go about their lives by getting from one place to another.

Psychologists are aware that ‘compassion’ is often a mask for totalitarianism. It’s long been known that ‘social justice’ is directly linked to totalitarian forms of government. As I wrote previously, “Soviet dissident Andrei Sahkarov said that millions of Russians were victims of terror “that attempts to conceal itself behind the slogan of ‘social justice’.” So I’m always suspicious of those who claim to care so much about the planet that they demand we all change to suit their caring vision.

“Environmental justice” sounds like just another slogan to conceal totalitarian control of our lives.

If you actually want to help with the recovery from Idalia, my alma mater Florida State University — the “the Seminole university” — has set up a website for anyone wishing to assist those in the coastal communities impacted by the storm.