The hurricane season in the United States goes from June to November. Prior to Hurricane Ian, the season had been “remarkably quiet.” Strange business when climate change is roaring about causing havoc to human populations; and goodness knows how our cousins the animals are faring. Dying out, like polar bears, I would guess.

Hurricane Ian was at category 4 when it hit the Florida coast. That’s powerful among hurricanes, which are measured on a scale of one to five. Undoubtedly climate change is reasserting itself, as true believers in anthropogenic global warming knew it would.

Counting Ian, the ten most powerful hurricanes to hit the US coastline, according to one source I found, started in 1893 with a category 4 hurricane, The Cheniere Caminada, which hit Louisiana. I don’t know, but maybe a powerful hurricane or two hit in the centuries before? Be that as it may, five out of the ten identified occurred before 1970 and five afterwards. The deadliest by far was the Galveston hurricane of 1900. Eight thousand people died.

Where does this leave us? Well, if you choose to believe in statistics, evidence and facts, it’s hard to show that climate change has had any effect at all on the frequency or intensity of hurricanes. For example, a comprehensive recent study by Italian scientists led by Gianluca Alimonti, from the Italian National Institute for Nuclear Physics and the University of Milan, found no evidence that extreme weather events, including flooding, droughts and hurricanes, were increasing in their frequency or intensity. This, of course, more or less echoes Shellenberger, Koonin, Lomborg among others.

Still, statistics, evidence and facts are one thing, feelings another. And, feelings must be respected. Most of the mainstream news media and many progressive politicians and commentators know instinctively, primevally, gut-wrenchingly, spiritually even, what the dire wages of burning fossil fuels looks like when they see it. Amen to that.