Stuff I’ve found ’round the interwebs:
More Weather Deaths? Wanna Bet?
by Donald Boudreaux @ WSJ
Writing recently in the Washington Post, environmental guru Bill McKibben asserted that the number and severity of recent weather events, such as the tornado in Joplin, Mo., are too great not to be the result of fossil-fuel induced climate change. He suggested that government’s failure to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases will result in more violent weather and weather-related deaths in the future.
And pointing to the tragedy in Joplin, Mr. McKibben summarily dismissed the idea that, if climate change really is occurring, human beings can successfully adapt to it.
There’s one problem with this global-warming chicken little-ism. It has little to do with reality. National Weather Service data on weather-related fatalities since 1940 show that the risks of Americans being killed by violent weather have fallen significantly over the past 70 years.
The longer lead times are probably the biggest help as far as survival rates go. The other night, the NWS issued a tornado warning for Dale City/Woodbridge for a storm that was speeding up the I-95 corridor, and sure enough, that warning preceeded any actual bad weather by about twenty minutes. Hooray for technology!
(By the way, there was no confirmed tornado, though conditions did get rather hairy for a bit.)
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Meanwhile, while I was away, Bill Whittle put out another vid, this time on Obama’s foreign policy:
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And lastly, in case you missed it, here is Iowahawk on our higher education bubble:
He is, of course, responding to reports that recent college graduates have had a lot of trouble finding jobs lately despite Obama’s glorious economic “recovery.”
Luckily, my teenaged students are smart. All of them are entering pre-professional programs and minoring in any passion that won’t guarantee them a job.
everymatt 