West Virginia is one of the few states that has generally rejected much of the kabuki theater surrounding the climate disaster narrative. Over the past several years, state lawmakers, including Democrats, have rejected calls to eliminate the state's coal industry. Meanwhile, Mountain State attorneys general signed up for lawsuits against Environmental protection Aagency and other federal bureaucracy for exceeding their powers in the name of climateand in 2022cut ties with financial institutions promoting the environmental, social and governance (ESG) agenda.
Yet for decades, climate change activists have hounded West Virginia's coal and natural gas industries, through electricity generation and through increasingly stringent carbon emissions limits. rules.
West Virginians are justified in their dissatisfaction with climate alarmist propaganda, since their region's powerful coal industry should not have been sacrificed on the altar of climate change in the first place. There is simply no evidence of impending disasters and weather chaos in West Virginia if one is willing to study and understand the data.
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After digging deep into data for West VirginiaJoin other US states to see how climate change has impacted their weather and overall environment, it is abundantly clear that the climate disaster claims espoused by experts and breathlessly reported in the media are clearly a false alarm.
Temperature data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) shows that year-round average temperatures in the state have increased since 1900. How much? A whole degree. One degree Fahrenheit. That's it. But I was told that even a small change could cause major problems. After all, some warming likely means more heat waves and heatwaves in general…or does it?
West Virginia data shows the number of “very hot” days, or days with temperatures of 95°F or higher, has increased. refused en masse from the first half of the 20th century. There are fewer extremely hot days in West Virginia today than there were in the late 1980s.
In many states, the rise in average temperature is not due to an increase in hot days, but rather an increase in warm nights, which is explained rather by Urban heat island effect than carbon dioxide.
As the Environmental Protection Agency states: “Structures such as buildings, roads, and other infrastructure absorb and re-radiate solar heat more than natural landscapes such as forests and bodies of water… [which] results in daytime temperatures in urban areas being approximately 1 to 7°F higher than temperatures in remote areas, and nighttime temperatures being approximately 2 to 5°F higher.”
West Virginia has no long term trend on warmer nights, but there has been very little increase since about 1990. very cold nights also has not shown a long-term trend since 1900, but there have been fewer extremely cold nights in recent decades than in the 1970s and 1980s. This is a good thing: the cold kills many more people than warm.
Other types of weather are equally important. The state's drought is not getting worse, and while there is a slight increase in precipitation overall, it is not matched by an increase in extreme precipitation events, including snowstorms or flooding. This is important because flooding is one of the major threats that West Virginians face due to the state's topography.
If West Virginians are more concerned about the future of the coal industry and fighting poverty than climate change, there's a good reason for that. Residents of the mountain states are not affected by climate change like the rest of us. Real data shows that extreme weather is not getting worse or becoming more frequent, no matter what the climate industrial complex and media parrots say.
Linnea Luken (eng.[email protected]X: @LinneaLuken) is a fellow at the Arthur B. Robinson Center for Climate and Environmental Policy at the Heartland Institute.
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