Ignoring the New Normal

Spectator

By Stephen Tuttle | Oct. 19, 2024

It seems no event, natural or human-caused, can escape the vivid imaginations of the conspiracy fans anxious to find wrongdoers lurking everywhere. Now it’s hurricanes and their aftermaths that have become the targets of the feeble minded and political grandstanders who want us to believe it’s all part of some grand election plot.

We’ve been variously told Democrats, or their financial supporters, now control the weather to such an alarming degree they can not only create hurricanes but can direct them to specific locations to cause the most possible damage to heavily Republican areas.

They do this, we’re told, through “chemtrails,” various space lasers, and cloud seeding. Then, once they’ve intentionally devastated an area with their artificially created disaster, they refuse to provide rescues, recovery, or relief, all the better to traumatize the victims.

It’s neither mystery nor conspiracy why hurricanes, which develop over warm water, would spin up in the Gulf of Mexico or the Caribbean and cause trouble in states with warm water coastlines. (The mystery is why no one claimed it was the Democrats causing these storms back in the days when Democrats were, in fact, controlling the southern states most likely to be whacked by hurricanes.)

The reality is there are no “chemtrails” controlling weather; the trails we see from jets at altitude are condensation on the heat of their engine exhaust. Additionally, we don’t operate weather-controlling space lasers, and it’s not clear how they would create hurricanes even if we did. Cloud seeding is a technique used in areas desperate for rain, an effort to create the condensation-precipitation cycle artificially, but it would be pointless in an area already receiving rain.

Nor is the government withholding or running out of relief funds because they have diverted the money to house and care for illegal immigrants. In fact, the Disaster Relief Fund, budgeted and approved by Congress under the Stafford Act of 1988, is a separate and dedicated funding source. Removing money from that fund for any purpose other than providing disaster relief is illegal.

People apparently forgot the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is an arm of Homeland Security with multiple responsibilities, including the provision of emergency food and shelter under the Consolidated Appropriations Act. A bit less than $120 million was appropriated to shelter illegal immigrants as required by law, but none of that came from the tens of billions set aside for disaster relief.

FEMA is currently running low on disaster relief funds because there have been too damned many disasters needing relief. With giant wildfires out West (and, no, the space lasers did not start those fires any more than they created hurricanes), tornadoes, and hurricanes, the cost of disasters in just the first half of 2024 amounted to $128 billion, $61 billion of which were insured losses. Add double digit billion-dollar losses for both Hurricanes Helene and Milton, and the agency needs more funding.

We should probably stop pointing fingers, too. Neither the Biden/Harris federal administration nor Gov. Ron DeSantis’ Florida administrations could have anticipated the double whammy of Helene and Milton, nor could they have imagined the breadth and length of Helene. Preparations were taken—FEMA, the Red Cross and utility companies had all staged emergency response teams in anticipation—but they did not expect Helene to cut a swath of destruction 400 miles wide. Asheville, North Carolina, previously described as a climate sanctuary city because of its relatively safe location and benign climate, experienced flooding, causing the single highest death toll from Helene though it is 300 miles from the coast.

It has always been the water rather than the wind that causes the worst problems in hurricanes. Storm surges of many feet can inundate everything, including people and animals left behind. But recent hurricanes have added historic rainfall amounts—17 inches in Asheville in two days—leading to equally historic and deadly flooding. It isn’t so easy to quickly supply tons of relief, or to remove debris, when the roads, bridges, and rail lines are simply gone.

Floridians, especially those living near the coast or rivers, need to realize these storms are not anomalies but part of a new normal whether DeSantis is willing to utter the phrase “climate change” or not. In fact, nature is trying its best to deliver messages we’ve ignored.

Once the storms had passed, some areas near the shoreline were buried in mounds of sand as nature tried to restore the very dunes developers had leveled. Now they are plowing those nature-made dunes back down again as we continue to ignore the obvious messages being sent.

We’ve leveled the dunes that offer some protection from high tides and storm surges, we’ve drained the swamps that provided a buffer, and we’ve built in the most exposed areas we could find. And, in a conspiracy of stupidity, we just keep doing it over and over again.