Wait, historical? But didn’t the weather always use to be mild and pleasant before the days of SUVs and jet aircraft? No. In fact there have always been hurricanes and floods and we have, as people say these days, the receipts. Or at least the photos and information from contemporary writeups for those in the last century or so, along with eyewitness accounts and other evidence from older ones. And even though the record we show you in this week’s #LookItUp entry is pretty convincing all on its own, it’s just a small sample of what’s out there for people who are willing to do the digging. Which should include a lot more “climate scientists” than it often seems to.

Credit here goes to Frances Carruthers of the Love Exploring website for assembling a list of extreme weather disasters from 1900 to 2024 that begins with the Galveston Storm in Texas in 1900 which left about 10,000 people dead. One of the reasons for such an appalling death toll was that meteorologists underestimated the incoming storm hazard. We are the lucky beneficiaries of the development since then of better monitoring and forecasting systems for things like hurricanes.

Another entry on the list is the 1909 Paris flood that lasted so long, at five months, that it became the 1910 Paris flood. And there was the 1922 Knickerbocker Storm, a deadly blizzard in Washington DC in January 1922 that dumped so much snow (28 inches) so quickly that the roof of the Knickerbocker Theatre collapsed, killing 98 people. And the massive Guadeloupe hurricane of September 1928 that killed 2,500 people in three countries. And so on.

The thing to bear in mind regarding every tragic entry on this list is that if the same thing happened today it would kill fewer people, because we are better prepared and more resilient to weather hazards. And alarmists would nevertheless blame it all on climate change, call it and the devastation a harbinger of doom, and try to make you believe such things never happened before.

But they did. And you can #LookItUp.