How Hurricane Harvey made Naomi Klein want to shut me up – by Terence Corcoran (Financial Post – August 30, 2017)

http://business.financialpost.com/

The winds and rains from Hurricane Harvey were battering Houston, so Klein sensed an opportunity to cash in on a timely disaster

On Monday, in my capacity as a Twitter watchdog over the general ideological health of the planet, I spotted a dispatch from Naomi Klein. As readers may know, when it comes to the ideological health of the planet, my advice would be to steer clear of Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine and other prescriptions for Dr. Green Statism to conduct full head transplants on the body politic and the global economic system.

The winds and rains from Hurricane Harvey were battering Houston, so Klein sensed an opportunity to cash in on a timely disaster. She sent around a tweet to her followers, but directed at one group: “Any journalists looking for climate experts to interview about #Harvey should read this piece, some very clear and credible voices in it.”

Before we get to the details of Klein’s effort, what seems clear about Harvey is this: it’s not the first time Houston has been underwater from hurricane action; Harvey ranks something like fifteenth-worst in the history of hurricane landfalls in the United States; it’s the first Category 4 to strike in 12 years, despite global warming theories; damages will set a record, but that is to be expected, especially since nobody in Houston appears to have paid any attention to warnings of hurricane and flood risk over the last three decades of exploding development.

None of this was part of Klein’s tweet agenda on Monday. The piece she had directed journalists to was a report in The Atlantic, which asked the question “Did Climate Change Intensify Hurricane Harvey?” and provided the answer: “The human contribution can be up to 30 percent or so of the total rainfall coming out of the storm.”

Coincidentally, I had sent a tweet of my own, just moments before: a Harvey-related commentary by Judith Curry, an American climatologist and former chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Curry’s view was that “Anyone blaming Harvey on global warming doesn’t have a leg to stand on.”

For the rest of this column: http://business.financialpost.com/opinion/terence-corcoran-how-hurricane-harvey-made-naomi-klein-want-to-shut-me-up