This makes you wonder what the White House sees as threatening about this information?

NYT’s Andrew Revkin points out the inanity of it:

Whatever your views on #AGW, disturbing to see @WhiteHouse delete factual tweet on hurricane history: http://t.co/NWakXMz9Om Open society? — Andy Revkin (@Revkin) June 24, 2013

Let’s do some fact checking.

From Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grover_Cleveland

Cleveland is the only president to serve two non-consecutive terms (1885–1889 and 1893–1897).

Grover Cleveland 24th President of the United States In office March 4, 1893 – March 4, 1897 In office March 4, 1885 – March 4, 1889

Obama’s term is January 20th 2009 to present. Source

Now let’s check the hurricanes for these periods:

From this NOAA source: http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/hurdat/All_U.S._Hurricanes.html

I’ve made screencaps of the two presidential terms of Grover Cleveland and totaled the numbers of hurricanes as listed by NOAA:

I count 27, rather than Goddard’s 26 (Note: 27 if you include the 1888 TS that NOAA included in the list of hurricanes, I’m guessing some post facto revision of this “hurricane six“) but the point remains the same. During President Obama’s term, Jan 20th 2009 to present, there have been only three US landfalling hurricanes according to the same NOAA data:

I find it interesting that NOAA puts in the disclaimer about Sandy, their exact disclaimer:

* – Indicates that the hurricane center did not make a U.S. landfall (or substantially weakened before making landfall), but did produce the indicated hurricane-force winds over land. In this case, central pressure is given for the time that the hurricane winds along the coast were the strongest.

Even though it didn’t make landfall, although it did affect the USA, but is listed, we will count it, Irene is also debatable, for weak wind speeds, but we’ll go with what NOAA says here.

The point is that there’s been far worse periods of US landfalling hurricanes during presidential terms, and that’s a fact.

Obama is also presiding over the longest ever period of major hurricane drought (Cat3 or greater) without making US landfall. From Dr. Roger Pielke Jr:

The graph above provides an update to data on the remarkable ongoing US “intense hurricane drought.” When the Atlantic hurricane season starts next June 1, it will have been 2,777 days since the last time an intense (that is a Category 3, 4 or 5) hurricane made landfall along the US coast (Wilma in 2005). Such a prolonged period without an intense hurricane landfall has not been observed since 1900.

Why is the White House afraid of these facts?

UPDATE: We’ll see how long my tweet lasts:

We have an obligation to future generations to act on climate change: http://t.co/wMpgpJJ4rO — The White House (@WhiteHouse) June 24, 2013

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