Michael Fumento

Whoa! Did we just have a hurricane season? Doesn't seem that way. "2009 hurricane season ends quietly with fewest storms since 1997," declares one headline. "The season featured nine named storms, the fewest since 1997, and for the first time since 2006 no hurricanes made landfall in the United States," states the article.

That's quite a change since 2005, when the coincidence of two major hurricanes striking the U.S. and causing lots of damage, Katrina and Rita, led to a storm of allegations that global warming was causing cyclones to rise up in revenge against man. Most notable was far-left science writer Chris Mooney's Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming, which Amazon.com informs us is "bargain-priced" and probably for good reason. Mooney not coincidentally is also author of "The Republican War on Science" and "Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens our Future." Perhaps it threatens our future, but in the meantime it's very good for his wallet.

Not that Mooney was alone by any means. In my 2005 Scripps Howard column "Green Hotheads Exploit Hurricane Tragedy," I provided what in retrospect proves an interesting blast from the past.

"The hurricane that struck Louisiana yesterday was nicknamed Katrina by the National Weather Service. Its real name was global warming." So wrote environmental activist Ross Gelbspan in a New York Times op-ed that one commentator aptly described as "almost giddy." The green group Friends of the Earth linked Katrina to global warming, as did Germany's Green Party Environment Minister.
Granted, as I've written recently there's been no warming in the last decade. But there's been no cooling since 2005, either. Same temperatures, far fewer hurricanes.

So as the Kingston Trio might sing, "Where have all the hurricanes gone . . . ? And where are all these blowhards now? Presumably blaming global warming for some sort of disastrous problem caused by a lack of hurricanes.