Targeting Al Gore, Horn said that the frequency and strength of
such hurricanes as Katrina were not increasing due to global warming
effects. Since cameras were put into space in the 1960s, Horn said,
"there has been no increase in the number of Atlantic hurricanes in the U.S.," nor has there been since 1900.
The primary indicator of the frequency and the size of
hurricanes, he explained, was found in ocean temperatures. "Right now,
the Pacific has gone cold," said Horn.
Since the mid-1970s, he said,
the Pacific had been in a warm phase. "Warm oceans bring more
hurricanes." Warmer oceans produce El Nino events and warm the
atmosphere. A colder Pacific will bring cooler global temperatures.
Horn's findings are in direct contrast to the U.N.
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, he said, which predicts a
warming of the earth from 4-10 degrees over the next 100 years. The
panel, he said, was basing its predictions on faulty computer models.
"Those computers models say there's a warming trend of the
atmosphere at 20,000 or more feet above the equator," he said, "but the
models don't remotely resemble the real-world feedback, which show
temperatures actually decreasing."
Horn accused the government's weather predicting and study
agency, the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NOAA), of
encouraging global warming findings as "they are more likely to get
funding," said Horn. Since 1990, he reported, the agency had spent $50
billion to study global warming.
For Horn, global warming was a self-perpetuating "multi-million
dollar industry." He cited Al Gore's film, "The Inconvenient Truth," as
a mechanism "to promote his "$5 billion hedge fund, Generation
Investment Management, in London."
Neither did Horn's weather findings see a problem with the
melting ice in the Antarctic. The amount of ice on the continent was
increasing, not decreasing. And, in the Arctic, the population of polar
bears has doubled since their number 40 years ago, he noted.
"Environmental groups have sued the EPA," he said, "to get them
on the endangered list because of what they think will happen to them
in the future. Getting that listing gives the environmental groups far
reaching power to dictate policy. The environmental groups are using
global warming to expand their power to save nature from the enemy, you
and I."
He also had harsh words for the news media for their "abysmally biased global warming reporting."
"They love a good disaster story," he said, like the melting
glaciers. "They're not in the news business; they're in the lying
business."
And he chastised the government for trying to forecast too far
in advance. "It hurts the credibility of weather forecasts, he said.
The Internet was also to blame "for offering so many forecasts. The
information age is the disinformation age."
Horn spent 13 years with NBC's Channel 30 in Hartford and has
won an Emmy for a documentary on hurricanes for CPTV. He has turned his
craft in weather forecasting into a business, "The Art of Weather,"
giving talks before groups and on cruise liners - and lately before the
Connecticut state legislature on the topic of global warming.
He was introduced by the library's oral historian, Carl White,
who still remembers the day his grandmother showed him a 30-foot-high
marker on a building in downtown Providence, R.I., of how high the
water rose during the 1938 hurricane.
Horn had photographs of that hurricane's effect on Connecticut,
how it had taken three out of four trees down in the state. The storm
claimed 600-700 lives in the region; New London County was hit the
hardest. "In Connecticut, the farther west you live," he said, "the
safer you are." Source