Watch: CNN anchor tries to tie Hurricane Harvey to climate change — then scientist shuts him down

A CNN anchor tried to push a climate change narrative on live air Friday while talking to a scientist about Hurricane Harvey, but the scientist was having none of it.

The exchange

CNN anchor John Berman was talking with Bill Read, the former director of the National Hurricane Center, on Friday when he asked if the intense hurricane that was bearing down on Texas was a result of climate change.

"Is there a why to this? Why there is so much water associated with this storm?" Berman asked. "One thing we heard from scientists over the last 10 years is that climate change does impact the intensity of many of the storms that we see."

Read responded: "I’m not — I’m probably wouldn’t attribute what we’re looking at here. This is not an uncommon occurrence to see storms grow and intensify rapidly in the western Gulf of Mexico. That’s as long as we’ve been tracking them, that has occurred. The why for the big rain is the stationarity. That fact that the storm is going to come inland and not move...while it has happened in some cases, to have a really big storm come and stall like this is really rare."

Uh, c'mon bro

It's true that a decade ago climate change alarmists were saying global warming would cause an increase in storms and storm intensity. As far as hurricanes go, that narrative is shattered simply by the fact that Harvey was the first major hurricane to make landfall in the U.S. since 2005.

Narratives aside, the Western Gulf of Mexico was simply ripe for hurricane development. The waters were extremely warm, very little wind shear was present, and there was an existing area of low pressure near Mexico — providing the necessary ingredients for rapid tropical development.

The storm is expected to cause massive flooding because it will move very little over the next three to five days thanks to a stationary cold front — not because of climate change.

Even history says so

According to a recent study from The Global Warming Police Forum, the number of hurricanes occurring annually in the Atlantic basin is decreasing steadily.

From the study:

In their intriguing analysis published in the Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics, the four-member research team of Rojo-Garibaldi et al. developed a new database of historical hurricane occurrences in the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea, spanning twenty-six decades over the period 1749 to 2012.

Statistical analysis of the record revealed “the hurricane number is actually decreasing in time,” which finding is quite stunning considering that it is quite possible fewer hurricanes were recorded at the beginning of their record when data acquisition was considerably worse than towards the end of the record.

At least one person has died so far from the storm. It has already been downgraded to a tropical storm, but its longevity is expected to bring catastrophic damage to Texas.

(H/T: IJR)