Grover Cleveland Did Nothing About Global Warming

The mass media are teeming with articles insisting that Hurricane Sandy proves we must adopt policies such as carbon emission reduction to combat climates change. Now the Kosher Hedgehog agrees that the earth is warming, the seas are still rising despite four years of a Barack Obama Presidency, and the devastation Hurricane Sandy caused in New Jersey and New York, among other places, proves that coastal protection is prudent. He hesitates, however, at adoption of policies that would cripple the recovery of our economy and in all likelihood have little or no effect on climate change.

As an antidote to the media frenzy, please turn to today's Best of the Web column by James Tarantino in the Wall Street Journal, Mr. Tarantino quotes from a Matthew Algeo column in a recent post-Sandy op-ed page of the New York Times:

[Mr. Algeo] describes how severe the weather has become. "On Tuesday, Aug. 22, in the Atlantic Ocean, four hurricanes were swirling simultaneously, an event never before recorded. . . . Wednesday night, one of the hurricanes slammed into New York City. At least 30 people were killed." Four days later, an even more powerful hurricane killed some 2,000 in and around Savannah, Ga.

What, you don't remember reading about those storms in the papers? That's not because reporters are dropping the climate-change ball, but because Algeo is writing history, not news. The hurricanes in question occurred in 1893.

Mr. Algeo recounts that President Grover Cleveland, a Democrat incidentally, refused to involve the federal government in disaster assistance, because, as he wrote in a veto message, it " "encourages the expectation of paternal care on the part of the government and weakens the sturdiness of our national character." Mr. Tarantino adds that President Cleveland did nothing about global warming either.