COMPLEX ADAPTIVE SYSTEMS DOING WHAT COMES NATURALLY.

Oh, did the North Atlantic hurricane season end Sunday?  Sorry, we were otherwise occupied.

That's the most snow recorded in one storm in DeKalb in November, courtesy of what the Weather Channel referred to as "Bellamy."  "Chan" is now churning up the Atlantic Coast, with ripples of annoying snow in here midafternoon, that after the consensus was for it all to have been done last night.

Meanwhile, the final named North Atlantic hurricane was Melissa, which brought all sorts of havoc to the Islands.  The mainland United States?

Hurricane season ended today 🌀

First time since 2015 that no hurricane made landfall on the continental U.S. pic.twitter.com/HiJuW3EoiG

— Latest in space (@latestinspace) December 1, 2025

That's giving Twitchy's "Grateful Calvin" opportunities to have fun.

Of course, most people understand that the 'climate crisis' movement never had anything to do with the climate at all. At best, it was always a grift. At worst, it was an effort by Marxists to destroy Western civilization.

But one thing we do know for sure is that Mother Nature does not care how many windmills we build. She is going to do what she is going to do, regardless of how loudly Al Gore shouts at her.

Still, the climate scam unraveled just a bit further last night when the 2025 Atlantic hurricane season ended. And, for the first time in a decade, it ended with not a single storm making landfall in the United States.

The predictable Twitchy side show is under way over there.

The main event is the National Hurricane Center putting the best possible spin on how their forecasts worked out.  "Seasonal activity fell within NOAA’s predicted ranges."  Well, yes, thirteen named storms out of an anticipated range of thirteen to nineteen, and five hurricanes out of an anticipated range of six to ten, and four major hurricanes out of an anticipated range of three to five.  And none churning up the Gulf of America.  There will be after-action reviews of each of the named storms, Atlantic and Pacific, as the analysts finish their work.  We repeat our 2024 observation, "margin of error" matters.

There are two undeniable truths.  First, complex adaptive systems do whatever they d**n well please.  Second, the climate alarmists will do whatever they think will scare us.  There's a one-day cold snap in the extrapolation models, due over Cold Spring Shops headquarters on Thursday, and as surely as the Vikings will not go to the Super Bowl, the weather types are throwing "polar vortex" around.  Dear reader, it's December in the State Line.  Meanwhile, the tropical cyclone season continues in Indonesia, and the resulting flooding has the usual suspects raising the usual alarms.  "More than 1,100 people across South Asia have died after torrential rains fueled by warming temperatures caused widespread flooding and landslides in recent days."  The disclaimer comes deep in the report.  "While it’s difficult to determine the extent to which any one disaster was caused by climate change, in aggregate, they are growing more intense as the planet warms."

It gets tiresome, and logic and content might be carrying the day, fittingly in geologic time.  "In the space of a few days, two events reached millions of people outside the usual scientific and media gatekeeping apparatus, and they both told the same heretical story: that the science of climate catastrophe isn’t nearly as settled, nor as dire, as we’ve been told."  That's a Heartland Institute release in Red State: be guided accordingly in relying on it as a source.  On the other hand, Ted "The Eco Modernist" Nordhaus reminds his readers that science is never settled.  (Obligatory methodological reminder: research that calls attention to anomalies or disrupts paradigms is riskier but might have a higher payoff, thus trust but verify.)  Mr Nordhaus asks, "When is weather climate change?"  (Cynical answer: when it's convenient for the doomsday ecologists to so claim.)

The absence of an anthropogenic climate signal in most climate and weather phenomena is not paradoxical. It is simply not possible given the amount of anthropogenic warming the planet has experienced. When scientists, journalists, and activists say that climate change made a given extreme event far more likely, what they are actually saying is that an event that is somewhat more intense than it would have been absent climate change could have been made so by climate change. To take the simplest example, a heatwave that is 1.5 degrees warmer than it would have been without climate change was made vastly more likely to occur due to climate change. The claim is tautological.

Put these two factors together—the outsized influence that exposure and vulnerability have on the cost of extreme climate and weather phenomena, and the very modest intensification that climate change contributes to these events, when it plays any role at all—and what should be clear is that climate change is contributing very little to present day disasters. It is a relatively small factor in the frequency and intensity of climate hazards that are experienced by human societies, which in turn play a small role in the human and economic costs of climate related disasters compared to non-climate factors.

But there are human interactions, particularly among people who Consider Themselves Educated, that turn climate science into climate dogma.  "Why do so many smart people, most trained as scientists, engineers, lawyers, or public policy experts, and all who will tell you, and I say this not ironically, that they 'believe in science,' get the science of climate risk so badly wrong?"  First, experts will use their expertise to defend their expertise rather than revise their priors.  Second, you wouldn't your integrity to get your grants cut off or your dating opportunities destroyed.  Third, you have to push the climate catastrophe to encourage the rabble to adopt green technologies.

The developers of the diesel-electric locomotive attempted something similar a century ago.

Compressed Air Magazine editorial illustration reprinted in Trains, December 1971, pages 18-19.

All of which might have been public-spirited, but it was the development of a diesel locomotive that could wiggle a long string of freight cars that vanquished steam.  There's something of a disruptive innovation in that story, but we'll save that for a long winter's night.

Rather, we'll let Mr Nordhaus close the hurricane season out with a warning to the Credentialed Experts, particularly those who rely too heavily on ideologies and abstractions.

Despite some tonal, tactical, and strategic differences, this basic view of climate risk, and corresponding demand for a rapid transformation of the global energy economy is broadly shared by the climate activists and the pragmatists. The impulse is millenarian, not meliorist. Underneath the real politik, technocratic wonkery, and appeals to scientific authority is a desire to remake the world.

For all its worldly and learned affect, what that has resulted in is the creation of an insular climate discourse on the Left that may be cleverer by half than right wing dismissals of climate change but is no less prone to making misleading claims about the subject, ignoring countervailing evidence, and demonizing dissent. And it has produced a politics that is simultaneously grandiose and maximalist and, increasingly, deeply out of touch with popular sentiment.

Which, for better or worse, might explain the appeal of Trumpism.