Full disclosure: Unlike Dr. Willie Soon, I believe global warming is influenced by human interaction, almost to the point where I want to paint my driveway white. I am also a liberal democrat.
Even with all this global warming talk, green energy talk, the C.A.R.S. rebate talk, and electric car talk among other things, one thing has gone under the bus, entirely. The main stream media has made no mention of it at all. I really don't expect them to, either. Not because I think the MSM fails in journalism (although I believe they do fail at journalism for the most part), but because there has been no activity. I speak about none other than the 2009 Atlantic Hurricane Season.
I just happened to think about hurricanes and how we have heard nothing in the news about hurricanes, let alone tropical storms, LET ALONE TROPICAL DEPRESSIONS! This is because there is nothing to hear about - there have been 0, count it, ZERO named storms. No hurricanes, and no tropical storms. Yes, we have had a single tropical depression off the coast of North Carolina, but it lasted a mere two days in late May.
For the second consecutive year, we have had no storms created in the month of June. Now I am not saying that this is an indicator of things to come in the final official four months of the hurricane season (I say official because the official time span is June to November where as I believe it to be April to October...maybe they changed official policy because of Global Warming?), but it is certainly GOOD news that we have had almost no activity in April, May, June and July (yes I am willing to jinx it by saying July even though one day remains in July).
The more interesting part of this all is that the predictions made by some expert groups (according to the Wikipedia page) keep coming down:
*December 10, 2008 (from Colorado University) - above-average activity (14 named storms, 7 hurricanes, 3 of Category 3 or higher)
*April 7, 2009 (from Colorado University) - near-average activity (12 named storms, 6 hurricanes, 2 of Category 3 or higher)
*May 21, 2009 (from NOAA) - near or slightly above average activity (9-14 named storms, 4-7 hurricanes, 1 of Category 3 or higher)
*June 2, 2009 (from Colorado University) - slightly below average activity (11 named storms, 5 hurricanes, 2 of Category 3 or higher)
*June 18, 2009 (from UKMO) - prediction of 6 tropical storms, with 70% chance of the total ranging from 3 to 9.
The experts at Colorado University did suggest the low activity could be the result of El Niño, but who the hell knows. All I know is that Atlantic Hurricane Season is not taking up valuable news time better utilized for the debate on health care.
So at least there is a little good news on the environmental front...