SOURCE:
Conservative commentator Candace Owens believes the history of the last few decades should lead one to be skeptical of climate change claims.
Owens appeared Thursday on the Fox News program “Tucker Carlson Tonight” to talk about those linking Hurricane Ian to climate change.
The Category 4 storm tied for the fourth strongest in Florida’s history with 150 mph winds, according to Fox Weather.
That placed it behind the Category 5 Labor Day storm of 1935 with 185 mph winds (the strongest to ever hit the U.S.), Hurricane Andrew in 1992 at 165 mph and Hurricane Michael in 2018 at 160 mph.
Ian is tied for 5th in U.S. history, with several storms having the same wind speed going back to the 1880s.
Table showing all continental US landfalling #hurricanes with max winds of 150+ mph. #HurricaneIan is in a tie for 5th with multiple other hurricanes (most recent one was Ida (2021)) for strongest winds on record at landfall. pic.twitter.com/LViiPLYloq
— Philip Klotzbach (@philklotzbach) September 28, 2022
“What’s going on obviously is an extreme tragedy, but as you pointed out, Tucker, it is a natural tragedy,” Owens said concerning Ian.
“If there [were] no human beings that walked the face of the planet, there would continue to be hurricanes, like there would continue to be blizzards and like there would continue to be tornadoes,” she noted.
Owens — who hosts a weekday podcast — argued, “There’s no lobby, in my opinion, that should be laughed at harder than the climate lobby because they just keep being proven wrong.
“Now, when I was a kid I was told it was global warming: ‘Hide under your desks, kids. The polar bears are going to drown because there’s global warming.’”
Owens stated that the global warming language shifted around 2011 to climate change because the earth started to cool.
“Before my generation … there was a generation that was told global cooling was going to spell the end of the world, except what happened was they were proven wrong and the earth started to warm,” she recounted.
“There was the ozone layer — remember the hole in the ozone layer? Oops, that actually wasn’t a tragedy, and so they moved on. There was the acidic oceans. There was going to be acidic rain because the oceans were acid. Oops, that didn’t happen, so they moved on,” Owens added.
“They’ve been wrong over and over and over again.”
Carlson responded that he’s fine with letting people believe what they want, “but if you try and take over my power grid on the basis of your ridiculous theories, then I think we have a right to fight back.”
Owens concurred.
“We absolutely have a right to fight back and where we need to start is in the education system because my mind was polluted about climate change — or about global warming, rather — because they sat us down in health class and they made us watch ‘Inconvenient Truth’ by Al Gore,” she said.
“That was a lie. It never came into fruition and they keep focusing on these young generations to sell them fear for their own power.”
The 2006 documentary film “An Inconvenient Truth” predicted global warming would lead to increasingly intense hurricanes and other weather events and the melting of arctic glaciers causing the world’s oceans to rise.
Jamie Rhome, acting director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Hurricane Center, told CNN’s Don Lemon on Tuesday he was not willing to connect Hurricane Ian to climate change.
“I don’t think you can link climate change to any one event. On the whole, on the cumulative, climate change may be making storms worse. But to link it to any one event, I would caution against that,” he said.
This is amazing. Don Lemon tries to blame Hurricane Ian on climate change. NOAA’s hurricane director shuts him down. pic.twitter.com/svTjHtE8hl
— Alex Pfeiffer (@__Pfeiffer) September 28, 2022
Concerning arctic ice melting, National Geographic reported in 2019 that Greenland’s largest glacier is growing. In May, Euronews reported that a major ice shelf in Antarctica has also grown during the last 20 years.
Scientists noted the growth of the Antarctica ice shelf followed a “rapid melting of ice in the second half of the 20th Century.”
“Antarctic ice loss nearly quadrupled from 51 billion tonnes per year to 199 billion between 1992 and 2016. But scientists do not know for sure how Antarctic ice will be affected by climate change and influence sea levels in the years to come,” Euronews reported.
The oceans have been rising since 1880, according to NOAA.
FactCheck.org concluded that there is “unequivocal evidence” that human activity is causing global warming. The fact-checker cited NOAA’s 2021 global climate report.
“The years 2013-2021 all rank among the ten warmest years on record. The year 2021 was also the 45th consecutive year (since 1977) with global temperatures, at least nominally, above the 20th century average,” the report said.
“Overall, the global annual temperature has increased at an average rate of 0.08°C (0.14°F) per decade since 1880 and over twice that rate (0.18°C / 0.32°F) since 1981.”