Dear Editor:
I see the climate alarmists are still filling the opinion page with more false information on climate change. If people would just look up the actual records they will find that floods, storms, hurricanes and even droughts have not increased but actually decreased both in number and intensity. The damage Sandy caused was not due to climate change. It was a normal sized hurricane that happened to hit a heavily populated area during a spring tide, the highest tide of the month which created a storm tide.
Now that was October 2012; how many hurricanes have hit the USA since then? None that I can recall, the largest number of hurricanes ever recorded was during the period of 1880-1889. The period from 2001-2009 was only in seventh place.
Part of the reason for the increased damages is increased population density. Fifty years ago an area may have had only one house. A tornado comes through and only one house is affected, today that same area may have a hundred houses. If a same size tornado would go through the damage would be much higher and the cost would be enormous and since tornadoes are rated on damage and not wind speed, size or force then the tornado today would have a much larger factor than the same size one 50 years ago.
Flooding has also gone down. I can remember as a kid it would flood every spring. We'd hop into the car and drive to the Gasconade and see how the fields were covered, and people would talk about having to go move their trailers from the river because the waters were rising. The last big flood we had was in 1995, how many floods since then have even reached the old Cedar City area much less left the banks of the Missouri.
Yet alarmists still want fossil fuels gone and to start a carbon tax. Even if the climate alarmist predictions had come true and they were right then what would a carbon tax do. Nothing but make it harder for you to make ends meet when you actually need the energy most. If we started today we could virtually end CO2 production in the USA in five years by building nuclear power plants across the nation and switching to electric vehicles and that wouldn't put a dent in the world wide production of CO2.