Tropical Depression Imelda is not receiving the extensive media attention she deserves, ostensibly because it did not come ashore with hurricane force winds, and not even as a tropical storm, but as a sprawling tropical depression accompanied by vast amounts of moisture.

Still, the damage from the flooding inflicted by its 35-40 inches of rain that has fallen over the past two days continues to render low-lying portions of southeastern Texas, including the greater Houston area, wet indeed.

In recent reporting, the mainstream media neglects to mention the Great Galveston Storm of 1900, when it refers to the grand-champion of all rainmakers in the US.  Hurricane Harvey claimed that dubious honor two years prior to Imelda. If the media had mentioned the GG Storm, it would been obligated to recount the unspeakable death toll, an estimated 6,000 to 10,000 lives lost in Galveston. The bodies of most of those now long forgotten victims of 1900 were never recovered. The death tolls from individual US hurricanes ever since pale by comparison.

It might seem modern-day journalists lack the perspicuity to go back further in the historical record to before 1950, the year climate alarmists like to claim as the beginning of the anthropogenic footprint. But an honest assessment would show that tropical storms, including Imelda, have wreaked havoc upon coastal populations since before the beginning of written history, in the Americas and in the South Pacific and Eastern Asia. 

Joseph Conrad describes one such Far East Pacific storm in his elongated short story “Typhoon.” It makes for a gripping read. 

Severe hurricanes and typhoons will continue to occur and to plague mankind from time to time during the remainder of this century. They are not newly invented, man-caused extreme weather events under the sun and should never be portrayed as such to credulous audiences.