The death toll for Typhoon Bopha is up to 540 souls with over 800 still missing and over 1,000 injured.

There has been very little coverage of this storm in the U.S., which is a little surprising.  The media usually loves stories where they can just quote rising death counts and report on human interest stories related to the typhoon.  I blame Kate Middleton.

It’s worth remembering, though, that this was an incredibly rare storm.  A category 5 typhoon really should not exist so close to the equator.  Typhoon Louise from the 1964 typhoon season was the only other category 5 to exist so close to the equator.

Climate change denialists will claim that you can’t say that global warming is occurring just because of a category 5 typhoon so close to the equator.  After all, it’s happened before.  And they’d be right.  No individual event can be held up to claim that global warming is happening.  But there have been so many unusual events and they just keep coming!

Talk about not being able to see the forest through the trees!  The evidence is overwhelmingly in favor of global warming occurring and all signs point to humanity as the root cause.  But I’m sure we’ll just continue fiddling along as the Earth burns.