An aerial photography taken and released by the Dutch department of Defense on September 6, 2017 shows the damage of Hurricane Irma, on the Dutch Caribbean island of Sint Maarten. (Photo: AFP)

I’m certain that we will hear it ad nauseam that Harvey and Irma, the two recent destructive hurricanes in the United States and the Caribbean, were caused by climate change and that they are incontestable evidence of man ravaging the planet to his own detriment.

Is this so? I doubt it.

It will also be said that these destructive hurricanes are unprecedented, because in the past there was no climate change to cause the likes of them.

Here is why I doubt. For most of man’s existence there was no reliable forecasting of the weather-climate over a short period of time, and keeping records of it for us to know how the weather behaved in the past compared to today. The BBC said in its online magazine in April 2015: “There was no such thing as a weather forecast in 1854 when Fitzroy established what would later be called the Met Office. Instead, the Meteorological Department of the Board of Trade was founded as a chart depot intended to reduce sailing times with better wind charts.”

Fitzroy was Admiral Robert Fitzroy of the British Navy. Called the father of meteorology, he used the recently invented telegraph to predict storms that were causing horrendous loss of life at sea. Before that, what passed for weather forecasting was superstition, conjecture and and forklore, not science.

The website, Earth Observatory, of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, in the US, said recently: “Around 650 BC, the Babylonians tried to predict short-term weather changes based on the appearance of clouds and optical phenomena such as haloes. By 300 BC, Chinese astronomers had developed a calendar that divided the year into 24 festivals, each festival associated with a different type of weather.”

http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/opinion/climate-change_111508