When I land on the east coast of America, people tell me they’ve never met a Trump voter. When I land in the middle, as I did last week in Kentucky, I meet lots. I chatted with my driver, who did not like Trump at first, but would vote twice for his re-election if he could, because of the jobs boom and the Brett Kavanaugh hearings. He’s a retired salesman who tutors kids from poor backgrounds in reading and maths. ‘I guess that makes me a conservative,’ he says.
I had to lecture in semi-darkness in Louisville, after a power cut plunged most of the university into darkness. I timed it so that just at the moment when the power company had promised the lights would come back on, I had reached the bit where I said that artificial light is now 60,000 times cheaper than in 1800, in terms of the amount of time you have to work to earn a given quantity of light — a calculation by the economist Bill Nordhaus, who won the Nobel Prize the day before my talk. But it stayed dark, and stiflingly hot.
That day Hurricane Michael slammed into Florida, causing devastation and killing 26 people. It had the third lowest recorded atmospheric pressure (919 millibars) of any hurricane to make landfall in America. The lowest (892mb) was the Labor Day hurricane of 1935, which killed 423. Yet the media continues to imply that recent hurricanes are linked to climate change, as if they would go away if we stopped driving cars: ‘The Hurricanes, and Climate-Change Questions, Keep Coming. Yes, They’re Linked’, said a New York Times headline on Thursday. I find almost nobody knows that there is no upward trend in the frequency or strength of such cyclones over the last four decades — a fact reconfirmed in the latest UN report last week.
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