Sowing the Hurricane Whirlwind: "News loves hurricanes. They usually form far, far away, providing at least a week of stories. And they often start with a bang. Down in the tropical Atlantic, young ones bomb out to amazingly low barometric pressures and outrageous sustained winds. Hurricane Ivan's lowest pressure, for example, would cause the needle on you home barometer to spin around twice. The resultant 'eyewall' winds were a 20-mile wide tornado."

"While we like to count up property damage and losses, no one mentions the fantastic revenue that these storms generate for the media, or that the constant drumbeat of Charley-Frances-Ivan, Charley-Frances-Ivan must have political repercussions. And so, Tony Blair was just in Washington to visit John Kerry, where he conflated Hurricane Ivan with dreaded global warming.

"I like just about everything about Tony Blair. He's smart, affable, and a real friend to a nation that needs some. But he's way off on global warming, and advising Kerry to bail out his campaign with apocalyptic climate hype invites a grilling by the climate truth squad, a rather large body of weather nerds in a weather-fixated country.

"Blair's problem is that he listens to his science adviser, Sir David King, who is one of the most ill-informed hawks on climate change on this greening planet. King actually pronounced the goofy global warming flick 'The Day After Tomorrow' as scientifically plausible, which should have completely blown away his credibility. Now he claims that this year's hurricane activity is a product of global warming and that warming will make hurricanes worse."