Department of Homeland Security pledges to keep Americans safe from … climate change?

Department of Homeland Security pledges to keep Americans safe from … climate change?

An Obama administration official announced Thursday that the Department of Homeland Security will be focusing more of its efforts on the effects of climate change upon the infrastructure.

“Increasingly, we’ve moved not only from a security focus to a resiliency focus,” said Caitlin Durkovich, assistant secretary for infrastructure protection at the agency, according to Reuters.

Does this entail a name change to the Department of Homeland “Resiliency”?

The Department of Homeland Security was created in 2002 by the George W. Bush administration in response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York City and Washington, D.C.

Apparently the borders are now secure, terrorism is no longer a threat and agency personnel have some extra time on their hands.

Durkovich made her remarks as a panelist at the Rising Seas Summit, organized by the U.S.-based Association of Climate Change Officers, a three-day event.

Reuters reported:

In the aftermath of 2012’s Hurricane Sandy, which devastated large swathes [sic] of the Northeastern U.S and caused over $60 billion in damages, Durkovich said her department reviewed the task of rebuilding with a new focus on “how to think about baking in resilience from the get-go.”

Hurricanes? As of 2012, the the United States actually experienced fewer major annual hurricanes, according to Forbes, which reported:

“The hurricanes that really matter, that cause damage” are not increasing. Hard, objective data show exactly the opposite. Indeed, during the past 4 decades, the time period during which global warming alarmists claim human-induced global warming accelerated rapidly and became incontrovertible, the fewest number of major hurricanes struck during any 40-year period since at least the 1800s.

The Forbes report was published in September, more than a month before Hurricane Sandy hit the Jersey shore. But even taking Superstorm Sandy into account, nothing is changed.

“US hurricane strikes peaked in the 1880’s, are down 29% since the 1870’s and currently the lowest on record,” Real Science reported two years after Sandy. (Story continues after graph.)

graph-hurricane

Rises in water levels as the result of hurricanes are severely limited to the time and place of the actual storm. What about a global rises in sea level?

To answer the question, the UK’s’s Daily Telegraph consulted Swedish geologist and physicist Nils-Axel Mörner, formerly chairman of the INQUA International Commission on Sea Level Change.

“The sea is not rising,” he told the newspaper in 2009. “It hasn’t risen in 50 years.” In addition, he predicted any future rise during this century will “not be more than 10cm (four inches), with an uncertainty of plus or minus 10cm.”

Global sea level rises are generally attributed to melting polar ice caps.

Last year, satellite data revealed that the arctic ice cap had grown by 50 percent–in a single year, according to The Daily Caller.

As for ice levels at the opposite end of the world, The Daily Caller reported in July that “Antarctica’s sea ice set another record this week, reaching 815,448 square miles above normal, breaking a record set this past weekend of 800,776 square miles above normal ice coverage.”

One final note: Thursday, Oct. 1, will mark 18 years with no appreciable global warming, according to CNS News.

But meanwhile, what about that border and those terrorists?

Michael Dorstewitz

Michael Dorstewitz

Michael Dorstewitz is a recovering Michigan trial lawyer and former research vessel deck officer. He has written extensively for BizPac Review.

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