Climate Catastrophe Is Absent in West Virginia – RedState

West Virginia is one of the few states that largely rejects the kabuki theater surrounding the climate catastrophe narrative. In recent years, state lawmakers, including Democrats, have pushed back against calls to eliminate the state’s coal industry. Meanwhile, Mountain State attorneys general have filed lawsuits against the Environmental Protection Agency and other federal bureaucracies for overreach in the name of climate and, in 2022, cut ties with financial institutions that championed the environmental, social, and governance (ESG) agenda.

Yet for decades, climate activists have targeted West Virginia’s coal and gas industries, through electricity generation and through increasingly strict carbon dioxide regulations.

West Virginians are right to be frustrated by climate scare propaganda, because their region’s robust coal industry should never have been sacrificed on the altar of climate change. The evidence of impending disasters and weather chaos across West Virginia simply isn’t there if one wants to examine and understand the data.

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After digging deep into the data from West Virginia, as well as other US states, to see what effect climate change has had on their climate and overall environment, it is clearly evident that the claims of climate catastrophe championed by experts and breathlessly reported in the media are clearly a false alarm.

Temperature data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) shows that average temperatures in the state have increased throughout the year since 1900. By how much? Quite a diploma. One degree Fahrenheit. That’s it. But I’ve been told that even a small change can lead to a spiral of problems. After all, some degree of warming probably means more heat waves and extreme heat in general… right?

Data for West Virginia show that the number of “very hot” days, or days with temperatures of 95°F or higher, has declined significantly since the first half of the 20th century. There are fewer extremely hot days in West Virginia today than in the late 1980s.

In many states, the increase in average temperature is not caused by an increase in hot days, but by an increase in hot nights, which is explained more by the urban heat island effect than by carbon dioxide.

As the EPA states, “Structures such as buildings, roads, and other infrastructure absorb and re-emit heat from the sun more than natural landscapes such as forests and bodies of water… [which] results in daytime temperatures in urban areas about 1 to 7°F higher than temperatures in outlying areas and nighttime temperatures about 2 to 5°F higher.

In West Virginia, there is no long-term trend for warmer nights, but a very slight increase since about 1990. The number of extremely cold nights also shows no long-term trend since 1900, but there are fewer extremely cold nights in recent decades than in the 1970s and 1980s. That’s a good thing: cold kills far more than heat.

Other types of weather conditions are just as concerning. The drought is not getting worse for the state, and while precipitation has increased slightly overall, it has not matched an increase in extreme precipitation events, including blizzards or flooding. This is important because flooding is one of the serious threats West Virginians face due to the state’s topography.

If West Virginians are more concerned about the future of the coal industry and poverty alleviation than climate change, it’s for good reason. Mountain Staters aren’t suffering from climate change, and neither are we. Real-world data shows that extreme weather events are not getting worse or more frequent, regardless of what the climate-industrial complex and media parrots say.

Linnéa Lueken ([email protected]X: @LinneaLueken) is a research fellow at the Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy at the Heartland Institute.

Editor’s note: President Trump is leading America toward the “Gilded Age” while Democrats are desperately trying to stop him.

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