I'm specifically speaking of the utter scam run on people when it comes to environmental issues.

Its not really their fault, but on the other hand it is: They simply don't have the experience of what was, as they weren't born yet (or in some cases were born but not yet sentient -- the age at which that occurs does vary some but nobody can argue they were at birth, for example.)

Further, and probably more-seriously, the decline of written material means that those who seek to lie can trivially erase things they don't want to admit for the purpose of deliberately misleading you.  That's hard to do with a physical book except by burning it, which leaves plenty of evidence since the book used to exist and no longer does.  In the world of electronic media you can change "history" and unless someone made a copy beforehand nobody's the wiser.  Witness the change in the dictionary definition of the word "vaccine" (yeah, go look it up -- you'll be shocked.)

Of course the physical presence of a book cannot compel you to read it.  Witness those who have never read both The Federalist and The Anti-Federalist.  If you're among them you have no concept of what the Founders envisioned and why the Constitution was constructed as it is, nor why the 10 original Amendments were required in order to ratify it.  Those two written works are literally the debate between the Founders of this nation and present two quite-different aspects to that debate and process.  You cannot claim to understand that process and thus are not qualified to enter into a debate as to what is and isn't appropriate to change unless you've read both and thus understand how the original decisions were reached.

Politicians and others who seek to influence society often pander to the part of the population who never had the background information to make informed choices.  One of the key points in the modern era is usually "environmentalism"; the goal itself is good but the incremental improvement available in America now is tiny and the cost astronomical.  That's right -- we already did it and those who lived through that time period know it and we don't have to read about it -- we directly experienced it.

There is a basic principle that essentially-always applies: The first 80% of any problem is trivially solved at reasonable cost.  The last 20% is exponentially harder as one approaches 100%, and further the resource expenditure in doing so, whether in time, month or both, goes vertical.

People claim we must "save Gaia" (the planet), for example.

Reality: The planet, in the context of America, is in better condition today than at any time in the last 150 years.

You think not?

Let's count just a few examples out of literal thousands:

• The predominant heating fuel until fairly recently was wood or raw coal in either an open fire or crude stove.  Combustion of same was woefully incomplete emitting a huge amount of tar and similar into the air.  While wood is still used in some areas for efficiency reasons most stoves are now of either a "rocket" or catalytic design and thus emit much less.
  
  
• Even in the 1970s the water was wildly polluted as was the air in the United States.  I distinctly remember both including watering eyes whenever driving past a chemical plant (of which there was one near my home), river water you could not safely swim in nor eat the fish from and similar.  Today there are no chemical plant fumes there and the water in the same place is clean -- and you can eat the fish.  This is true literally all over America; Love Canal anyone?  Not one person younger than about 50 remembers any of this but it is fact.
  
  
• Until 1975 there were no catalytic converters on cars.  Every single vehicle stank -- badly -- from the moment it was started until it was shut off.  The early catalysts, however, were not particularly efficient and because those engines still had no closed-loop control they were hot enough to start fires if you parked over dry material -- and sometimes did.  Modern closed-loop systems showed up in the early 1990s; the reduction of pollutant emissions by modern vehicles compared with engines prior to that time exceeds 99%.  At the same time fuel economy dramatically improved because closed-loop operation allows the engine to run at almost-exactly stochiometric mixtures and therefore the engine does not deliberately waste fuel to avoid damage from lean combustion.  Indeed the CO reduction in modern automobiles is so extreme that it is actually fairly difficult to kill yourself deliberately via CO poisoning using a modern car engine where with older, pre-catalyst engines you could literally do so in minutes.  Simply put unless you're older than 40 in the US you never lived in a world where air quality was this good.  All the bellyaching about vehicle emissions and thus the claimed "need "for electric cars in the modern world, in short, is flat-out bullshit.
  
  
• Older coal-fired things, whether power plants or steel mills, were hideously nasty emitters of pollutants.  Modern coal-fired power plants (which the EPA is now trying to kill with impossible to meet regulations) are 90-95% cleaner in both Sulfur Dioxide and Nitrogen Oxide emissions compared with the same plant in the 1950s yet nobody ever considers that for the exact same amount of electricity produced they now emit 1/20th of the pollution they did just 50 years ago and will keep the lights on as long as they have fuel.  Nonetheless they're not as efficient as natural gas since the combustion temperature is lower and they cannot run combined-cycle, which natural gas plants can -- and thus on a per-unit-of-energy cost basis, depending on the price of both fuels, natural gas is frequently cheaper.

The Laws of Thermodynamics are not suggestions; no law passed by man can change them.  All transformations of energy involve loss; this is guaranteed by thermodynamics.  Thus the most efficient way to do a given thing is always to use whatever form of energy is available that can be used directly without transformations and is of lowest all-in cost.

In addition intermittent sources of electricity (e.g. solar and wind), for example, will never win compared with either atomic energy or combustion fuels and all of them require seriously-toxic chemical processes to construct, have limited lifetimes and present serious disposal costs and environmental mitigation on the back end that everyone always ignores.  Windmill blades are made out of fiberglass, which in turn is made from oil, and they are not recyclable.  In addition they kill birds by the millions because while it looks like the blades are turning slowly at the tip the rate of movement is in fact nearly supersonic and a bird cannot see it.  Solar cells require nasty chemicals and rare earth metals to produce which in return requires digging up huge amounts of land to acquire them and when either damaged or they wear out they too present serious environmental risk.  If destroyed by bad weather such as hailstorms the damage to the environment from the release of those materials (onto the ground under them) is severe and immediate.  In addition both are unreliable and this efficiency problem cannot be overcome because while solar and wind are great when the sun is shining or wind blowing (1) collecting that energy covers vast amounts of land compared with all the other alternatives and (2) you have to have available another form of generation all the time, and pay for it to be available, otherwise you have no electricity when they're not available.  Since covering that potential lack of capacity is equally expensive as just buying and staffing the nuclear or carbon-fueled plant in the first place you're basically choosing to double your power bill and may I remind you that every single thing we do in our economy -- and thus its price -- has energy in it.  Your grocery store, for example, needs both lights and the power to run the refrigerators or you have no meat, dairy and similar -- and that power has to work 100% of the time.

Further while heat pumps for heating use win in some circumstances against a natural gas furnace they lose a good part of the time, and not by a little either, especially when it gets materially cold outside.  The exact cross-over point is easy to compute  given the price of both power and gas along with the efficiency of the heat pump at a given temperature (its just simple math) but in every case where electricity has been moved off carbon-based fuels to renewables it is a near-certainty that natural gas will win on cost -- and not by a little and in addition the maximum demand for heating is of course in the winter at night -- when there is never any solar energy available.  I've written a column on this; heat pumps only win in moderate temperatures if electricity is cheap or if you're forced to use Propane because there is no piped gas; otherwise you are way ahead to simply burn the gas directly in your furnace.

This same cost issue applies to all commerce!  If you wish to force businesses, for example, to use heat pump or other electric heating fuels you will radically increase their costs and guess who gets to pay that in the price paid in the store?

Further natural gas is a nearly-pollutant-free energy resource.  Yes, it produces CO2 when burned (and water vapor); neither is a pollutant.  CO2 is plant food.  Since you either eat the plants yourself or you eat what eats the plants increasing the growth rate of plants is a public good rather than a menace.  You would like lower cost food rather than higher -- or worse, not enough food at all -- yes?  And may I remind you that one of the key components of fertilizer for crops is in fact made from..... natural gas!

It is true that the climate changes.  It always has and always will.  What is not true is that we are evil SOBs who are out to destroy the climate or the Earth generally by polluting it; on the contrary; the data is that has been no change at all in, for example, the total energy in tropical cyclones since we began to be able to accurately compute that (e.g. since the satellite era began and thus we can "see" all the hurricanes where before satellites many were undetected since unless the storm hit land  -- and many do not -- only the poor SOB who ran into it at sea by accident knew about it.)

Indeed some of the things we've done to clean up the planet have actually allowed more solar energy to reach the surface.  Specifically we have insisted on far lower-sulfur fuels for ocean-going ships which reduces sulfur dioxide emissions and that makes the air more-clear thus more solar energy reaches the surface.  The same thing is true for coal-fired power plants over the last 50 years; that is, we have in fact increased the amount of solar energy reaching the surface of the planet  by a small amount because we made the air cleaner.  This of course is the exact opposite of what you're told and sold by those screaming about "climate change."

There are lots of people who wish to lie to you about both history and where we are now for the purpose of making money.  Never forget that in any regulated line of business -- that is, where there's a monopoly of any sort whether "natural" or otherwise, since profit margins are capped the only way to make more money is to force the total amount of spending to go up.

Power companies are natural monopolies; there is only one set of power lines to your house or business.  You have a personal incentive to, for example, improve the seal around your windows because it reduces your heating and air conditioning costs.  The power company cannot cause you to consume more power by breaking your windows or removing your weather stripping and their profit margin is capped by the rate-setting process so the only way for them to make more money is to "agree" that if you are forced to use electricity instead of gas the climate will be irrevocably ruined and thus you will be compelled to spend more money to heat your house or buy and operate a vehicle even though that claim of "permanent ruination" is a lie.

Likewise the car companies are all in on the government mandating all these new "nannies" (e.g. lane-keeping, blind spot monitoring and similar.)  Why is it that the crash rate has not gone down if these things actually work?  Obviously they do not work otherwise the crash rate would drop like a stone and it hasn't.  But what has happened is that the cost of cars and insurance has risen dramatically with a large part of the cost increase being in the mandated "nannies" and the expense when one of them gets broken; instead of a $200 windshield now its $1,000 because the camera and other sensors has to be realigned at the dealer.  The insurance company has its profit margin capped so the only way for them to make more money is to force up the cost of vehicles and collision repairs so they therefore can charge more for the insurance!  You are told this improves safety but the data says it has not; all it has done is drive up the price which you are forced to pay even if you don't buy a new car because you might be at fault in an accident and the other guy did buy the new car with all the fancy mandated gadgets on it.

If you're young you might fall for the "imminent ruination" of the environment and planet generally because you've never seen it so much worse than it is now.  You see, in 1970 you weren't alive -- but I was, and I remember it.  You've never seen America look like this because you were never alive when it did.

I was.

It no longer is.

The air is no longer poisoned.  The factories and chemical plants no longer belch eye-watering fumes and poison the water to the point you cannot swim in it or eat the fish.  The tailpipe of your car no longer belches fumes that can kill you in minutes and being caught in traffic does not cause you to choke on the unburned hydrocarbons and carbon monoxide.  Earth has quite-literally never been healthier; no longer do you get polio from your drinking water as that disease is fecal/oral in transmission.  No, it was not the vaccine that stopped it; it was in fact the improvement in public sanitation as the case rate was dropping like a stone before the vaccine was introduced.

So-called "Green Energy" is a scam; it is neither green nor are we destroying the planet by exploiting carbon.  On the contrary; we have wildly cleaned up the planet from our previous actions, it is in better condition today than any time in the last 150 years and all of that has happened while we have built more vehicles and consumed more carbon-based energy than ever.  Indeed the cleaning of the air has led to more solar radiation reaching the surface of the Earth because we cleaned up the air, not the other way around, and this is a good thing since I presume you'd prefer not to choke on dirty air.

Don't fall for the scam: It is nothing more than yet another grift designed to make your poor for the benefit of a few monopolists and their cronies in government.  Tell them to cut that crap out and if they don't you will cut them out rather than be impoverished by their deliberate, malicious lies.

Milton, that is.

BTW if you say one word about the lie of "climate change" (yes, the climate is always changing, no, we're not doing it) or "the government is aiming hurricanes at red folks" you will be blackballed from my life and anywhere I can influence and you don't get to take it back either.  Think long and hard before you run that shit around me; I lived in Florida for 20 years, including 2004 which was a "oh its a new week and there's another fucking hurricane coming" year.

As for this storm being "unprecedented" no it isn't.  Nor is it likely (at all) to maintain its monster status all the way to impact.  Doesn't matter; its going to suck and, if it goes where I think it will if you're around Tampa its going to suck badly.  Tampa is blessed to a material degree with geography in the way the coastline lays but a straight-in west-to-east path that goes in just north of town will hose people badly due to the bay getting water rammed up it, which is exactly what it looks like is going to happen.

That has happened before but the last time it did there were a lot fewer people.  And further, the barrier islands in the area were and are, well, barriers.  Now they're full of very high-value homes and such.  Well, as of today they are anyway.  Get back to me in a couple more days on that.

Florida has two basic problems: The two "economic drivers" are tourism and construction.  The former is ok but subject to economic downturns, of course, but the latter is subject to corruption, that's been a huge problem all the way back to "swamp land sales" and today its found in alleged standards that aren't followed and nobody goes to prison when it happens.  In addition there has been a "re-pricing" of plenty of places that were originally concrete block (good) and considered entirely reasonable to fill up with water and sand when the storm comes, then be shoveled out and the contents discarded when originally built -- but then they got all dolled up and sold for 20-50x their original price and "value."  The problem is that they're still at the same 5' elevation off the water they were before and thus the same thing happens when the surge shows up but now the damage is ridiculous and after a few rounds on that bull nobody wants to write insurance since the next loss is definitely going to come.  Big shock, right?

Again if the place was $100k and the contents considered disposable nobody would really care much.  Yeah, its a risk but the $10k you lose between the shitty furniture and shoveling out and pressure-washing the cinderblock is the price of living in paradise and thus you suck it up and pay.  But when that same place is all dolled up and now sells for $2m or more with a half-million or more in contents on top of it you have a different story and much wailing -- or worse, you bought the cinderblock place, got out the Cat D8 and put up a $3-5m Taj Mahal where the "we know it will get full of sand when the storm comes" thing once stood.

The boat situation has gotten untenable as well.  Guess what -- boats in unprotected places during a storm turn into pinballs. If they just sank well that would be on you but that's not what happens; they get loose and wreck everything they hit.  Unfortunately most of the marinas of reasonably recent construction are not in protected places -- after all, we need mooooaaar of them because people want boats, and so up they go.  Then the storm comes and every boat in there gets destroyed -- and that problem is made worse when the owners do not live there and thus can't, several days in advance when the first hint of trouble appears, move the boat out of the range of danger, which is often the case -- or they just choose not to!  Oh yeah, insurers all demand (these days) written hurricane plans but that doesn't make the 25 ton pinball not bash around for 8 hours if the dude isn't there.  I saw plenty of that in my 20 years, including some vessels that appeared to me to be intentional sales to the insurance company -- of course I can't prove it -- but the ground tackle and/or lines they were using were either the product of someone's Three Stooges level of competence or intentional and again, it doesn't matter which if you're on the receiving end of said pinball.  (BTW I took zero damage from the storms to my vessels in the years I lived there and no, it wasn't blind luck either -- well, except for the kicked-off tornado during Ivan I saw on TV headed straight for where she was that could have easily gotten Gigabite despite my best efforts.  God missed, thankfully.)

When it comes to the politics of this its really quite-simple on a state political level: They all love the wreckage.  Oh there is plenty of crying for the camera and stern-eyed concern but the truth is much simpler when you get down to it: GDP is GDP and every dollar spent on rebuilding someone's illegally-signed-off construction which didn't actually meet requirements, and then is permitted to be put back together right where it was as it was is a dollar of the "economy" that the state claims is "booming."  The part they forget is that the "boom" came in the form of a hand grenade up your ass as a consequence of all the grift and fraud in the first place including the permitting that never should have allowed said Taj Mahal style construction, particularly on barrier islands.  Never mind the ambulance chasers in the form of "public adjusters" and similar bullshit that always show up after these storms.  And can we talk about the deliberate interference against reasonable mitigations run by, for example, municipalities that do not encourage or even require that all trees within the fall line of a residential roof be cropped back to below said point or removed?  Indeed some even go so far as to prohibit taking said trees out or require pre-approval and permits to do so -- on your own land.

At least I didn't have that problem where I lived -- Mr. Saw got some use right after I bought the place down there and a few years later, when Ivan showed up, I was glad I did.  I don't know if those trees would have come down and hit the house or not but they can't if they're not there and if they are there, and do come down on your roof, you're boned.

I left Florida about five years ago for these reasons.  No, storms were not going to get more-intense, but the stupidity and grift was going to continue to be a problem, that insurance issues it causes were accelerating and like it or not I was going to be forced to pay for it if I remained.  There are no "grift-free" places in this country and corruption is everywhere but there are those places that have more of it than others, and some that have structural incentives in their economy for it to explode exponentially, and sadly Florida had turned into that over the previous 20 years.

Two days ago I called the most-likely impact location to be between Hudson and Crystal River while plenty of "professionals" were wishcasting it south so Tampa would be on the "cleaner" side and, while it would still take a beating, wouldn't get the crazy surge.  I called it like I saw it and it looks like its going to verify, but there is still plenty of time for me to be wrong.  The southern end of my expected impact envelope is about as bad as it gets for Tampa Bay and its environs (e.g. Clearwater Beach and south all the way into the inlet) and a bit north won't help much.  Inland this thing will track pretty close to Orlando; we'll see what it does there as well.

As for strength the good news is that it likely peaked last night -- and as it comes in closer while it will expand in size it should run into a buzzsaw of shear that should do some serious damage to maximum wind levels.  Unfortunately that will do little or nothing when it comes to surge up the bay in particular and who knows what sort of actual construction integrity you have under that pretty roof particularly in the Tampa area which hasn't been "tested" it his regard.  My bet: There will be plenty of roofs flying around in pieces testing the integrity of your window protection (and possibly wall construction integrity as well.)

If you're where you can get nailed by that get out.  Take a look around the Treasure Island Causeway at all the boats and tell me whether you'd like a few dozen of them to play pinball with your house, because that is exactly what is likely to happen.

The exception is if you've ridden out a decent storm in previous years and you're comfortably above the expected surge  level where you are.  Unfortunately for Tampa proper they haven't been hit with anything material in a very long time so exactly zero of their buildings have been battle-tested.  This is not true further south and north of course, but it sure is within Tampa and the immediate surrounding area.

I ain't liking this one.

I want heads.

The "climate screaming" garbage is once-again screwing people -- specifically, hurricane Helene.

That was not a Cat 4 at landfall.  There were chasers on the air live that went through the eyewall at Perry, which is a bit more than 10 miles from the coast.  I know exactly where they were as I've been there.  I watched them live while at the same time having a live radar view up as the eyewall went over them.

They were standing unassisted in the alleged "130mph winds" a few minutes before the eye got to them.

Further both before and after the trees were all still up and so were business signs.  Yes, there was a very-dramatic video of a shed that blew across a road.  It appeared to be one that was for sale at a hardware store or similar that was unanchored and of course has nothing in it for ballast; it got blown around as would be expected in winds of 70mph or so.

By the way the cops were still out (with their lights on) and they don't stay out in those sorts of winds because none of those departments want to lose their people or cop cars from flying debris -- so when it really gets going they call all the cops back to their nests and if you need 'em -- well, too damn bad they'll come when its over.

Surge was, as expected, pretty nasty.  If your residence or business is 5' off the water and the predicted surge is 8' you might think you're going to maybe take 3' of water.  Nope; you are going to take 3' of water plus whatever the waves are on top of that, and if the wind is blowing 70mph and you have a bunch of open fetch (miles) over which it blows you'll get another 3-5' of waves on top and by the way water in size like that will smash through structures.  Interestingly enough in Steinhatchee, which took the surge and was a near-direct hit on the coast there were plenty of places that were built with basically no freeboard and were dismounted and thrown around -- but all their roofs were still on and so were the walls!

You can mitigate the wave action (e.g. with a kneewall or similar) but not the flooding; if whatever you have gets overtopped the water is coming in.  That's how it works.  The people who built fish camps and similar there -- and on Mexico Beach -- decades ago knew this and were fully aware of the risk -- that they'd get destroyed when, not if, the storm comes.  Thus what they built had little value and was easily replaced.  Then people show up and start bidding the existing places up and putting $500,000 structures there which is fucking stupid and of course they get destroyed.

Muh climate change!  No, you are a fucking lunatic and hate money.  I know you want to make that my problem but it isn't and if you don't cut that shit out and accept the consequences of your own actions I'll feed your ass to an alligator -- ass-end first, so you can enjoy being consumed before you die.

How about Tampa?  The claims of "unprecedented surge" are lies.  Tampa has a roughly 2-2-1/2' tidal range and all these lying pieces of shit were taking the peak surge numbers off MLLW -- that is, mean LOWER LOW water or the unusual (but not unprecedented) LOW TIDE LEVEL.  The claims were that the 6'ish surge was "unprecedented", which it isn't -- Tampa hasn't taken any sort of real hit in roughly 100 years and its simply due to the way the coastline lies there and that a storm has to come in just north of or directly up into the inlet to screw the town with flooding.  If it comes in south so the bay is on the outflow side it sucks the water out instead of ramming it in.  But 100ish years ago exactly that happened and it of course has before, but all of this was before air conditioning and few people wanted to live there before there was air conditioning, especially in the summer and early fall months because its hotter than Hell.

Take 2-2-1/2' off the "breathless" reported figures, by the way, and you have a 4' elevation of the water level above the expected and ordinary, every-day high tide level.  If you are stupid enough to put something of value below that and which cannot withstand being inundated on the bay you deserve what you get.

But probably the most offensive was the ridiculously widespread claims of threat inland.  Scream too many times and nobody listens when they should.  For example the local news here claimed we were going to get 8" or more of precip and hurricane force winds.  Bullshit.  We did get a decent storm in front of the hurricane (which had nothing to do with it; it was a bog-standard cold front) with a few inches of rain but that had nothing to do with Helene.  There was no deluge and no hurricane-force winds exactly as I explained to the people in a bar a couple of nights ago would not happen -- and why.  Simply put we have a mountain range between the storm that was coming and us; not only will that lift the air (which then condenses as it cools) but the windfield had zero odds of being at hurricane force by the time it got here.

The problem was that there really was a risk on the southern side of that mountain range and up toward Unicoi (and further NE where you're on the INCOMING side of the storm) for very high rainfall amounts which did materialize.  Helene was very fast-moving, which isn't that unusual but most of the time tropical systems cross Florida and exit off the East coast.  This one went north right up into the mountain range here -- and was forecast to do so because the front that preceded it getting here was forecast to lift out and leave a cut-off low behind -- and it did.  The area around Asheville got pounded but here, once again when it comes to the results human stupidity was and is largely involved.  If you look at the land around the French Broad River it is very clear that there is a large floodplain associated with it.  How the hell do you think it got there?  Do you think the Biltmore was put on the top of the hill because the owners were stupid or do you think they knew damn well that putting it right down on the river would result in it being flooded and severely damaged when, not if, the river blew its banks due to heavy rainfall up in the nearby mountains which does happen from time to time?  Oh by the way the river arts district, which flooded badly, was abandoned by the former industrial users and thus was taken over by the artsy folks because..... it flooded.  Duh.

I mean, I get it -- building right on an inland river in a mountainous area's valley is pretty.  Where the hell do you think the water that falls on the mountain is going to wind up?  Answer: If there is enough of it all that rain will come right through your living room, and there's a crap ton of both commercial and residential structures in said areas in Asheville and this region generally.

No, this is not "unprecedented"; if you think it is you can't be bothered to look at the terrain which is clearly a floodplain.  Why do we call it a floodplain?  Because it floods.  I know, I know, it hasn't in a long time but if you have even just one working eyeball the risk is obvious on casual observation.

Every single person with an IQ larger than FIVE has seen a downspout off a roof during a heavy rainstorm. On the ground in the area, its wet and you're getting rained on.  Coming out of the downspout is a deluge.  How does a mountain compare in size to your roof and by the way scale it up in your head and then come talk to me about that river in the valley.

Should we regularly and with a straight-face focus on the real places where high risk is when a storm approaches?  You bet.  The land in front of a mountain range where a storm is headed toward is going to get the bulk of the moisture; you don't have to be a rocket scientist to understand why -- just go hike the mountain, realize that it is cooler up there than at the bottom and as air cools the water carried as vapor condenses and it rains.  In addition if you have rivers, streams and areas that clearly were the runoff path below a mountain, and you usually do, where do you expect the water that falls on said mountain to end up?  This was no exception and reality is that those who build high-value structures on flood plains and adjacent to streams and rivers in a mountain valley should expect them to get flooded.  When Sarah and I were out west and came across the Teton Pass I saw an utterly insane display of that stupidity next to the river on the Idaho side; the number of people who built in what was very clearly a first-level flood plain (with a second bank above the house!) was astounding.  Most of these structures were quite-new and very expensive.  I highly doubt a single one of them could be bought for under $1m.  Dumb; when the water comes up, and it will, every single one of them is going to flood and by the way that's in the valley of the west side of the mountain range there and weather tends to travel from the south and west in the United States.

We do serious damage to public confidence when we scream about things that are just flat-out crap particularly when we dilute focus from where attention should be placed, which in this case means two things: Surge and facing-the-storm areas of mountains specifically the valleys under them where all the water is going to run when an incoming storm gets lifted, cools and the water condenses out as rain.  Helene was a hurricane, that's for sure.  But there sure as hell were not sustained 100+mph winds at Perry.  No way, no how, period.  I don't give a crap what some jackass claims they measured with a dropsonde; all that matters to people is the wind on the ground and this was in no way a Cat 4 storm -- not even close.

We spent all of our breathless screaming over bullshit while ignoring the very real issue that was about hit people in the face.  Yeah, there were warnings but if you scream about the entire world when the real risk is in one or two places you get ignored by everyone and then people get seriously screwed or die.

I went through Ivan at my house in Niceville.  That was the real deal and I know damn well what that sort of windfield looks like on the ground because I went through it and, in the middle of it, went out the back garage door in the lee of the building to shut down the outside breaker panel after power was lost to protect against possible shorts that might be present when power came back up.  I foolishly stuck my head (wearing a dive mask for protection of my eyes) around the corner after doing so and but for being quick-handed that mask would have wound up somewhere in Alabama.  There is no way what came in at Perry was anywhere near that and I'm tired of the breathless screaming from climate alarmists who bullshit their way through every single fucking storm that shows up and tells us all that its "unprecedented" when those of us who have gone through these damned things, and I did so for 20 years, know they're full of shit and would like to see them all fed to alligators or sharks to shut them the fuck up.

And yes, I bought my place in FL knowing the risk and accepting it.  Part of my selection criteria was the specifics of that structure and where it was to attempt to mitigate said risk.  I was successful in doing so; many others who made somewhat different choices were not.  Had I failed that would have been nobody else's fault or responsibility -- it would have been mine.  When I moved here I made similar observations and choices.  In other words it was my responsibility both times for either good or bad, not some imaginary "insult" that I lay off on my next door neighbor driving an SUV.

Finally, as to Asheville and the rest of Western NC and its infrastructure -- particularly communications.  Who the fuck put the data concentration points, necessary for any of today's Internet (on which all cellular communications rides today) where they can flood?  I'll tell you who -- idiots.  Second, if I hear one more person telling me that we must de-carbonize I'm going to rip their head off right there and shit down their neck.  Every single bucket truck now heading there to fix things runs on diesel.  So do all the rest of the earth-moving gear to rebuild the roads and all the chainsaws run on gas.  Oh by the way one of the reasons the cell towers are down is that they have no power and of course that area is full of people who "hate oil" -- well, how would you like a nice diesel backup generator at the tower right about now?  And while you're at it find the assholes who put the switch infrastructure and repeaters for the fiber in the area where they can flood and who also bitched about having big enough backup generators and their fuel supply because that isn't "green" and thus they have neither, said facilities have no long-duration backup power and you have no communications.  String every one of those blue-haired idiots up once you get done clearing the roads and restoring power.

Oh, and if you prefer a video rant -- here's a drunken podcast!