Meteorologist Dan Skeldon Discusses Hurricane Evacuations, Climate

NBC40's chief meteorologist, Dan Skeldon, spoke on Saturday morning at the Ocean City Community Association's monthly meeting.

Among topics discussed were hurricane patterns, his preliminary predictions for this summer, and climate change.

During the talk, Skeldon said that one of his biggest concerns is that because of Hurricane Irene's limited impact last year on Ocean City, many people may be less inclined to evacuate when another hurricane hits.

"I believe the evacuation rate next time is going to be much, much less because of what happened in Irene," he said. "People are going to think, 'ah, hurricanes are not that bad,' but they can be."

He said he believes that the east coast will face hurricanes for the next ten to twenty years.

"We're entering a cycle where hurricanes are more inclined to come up the coast with the prevailing patterns," he said.

Still, if people do not heed meteorologist's warnings, he said, disaster can strike. He used Hurricane Katrina as an example—he said that despite the forecasts being "spot on," and despite people having three days warning, 3,000 people died after Katrina hit.

"We want that casualty number to be zero," he said. "It's the one type of forecast I'm happy to blow."

In south Jersey, he warned against a false sense of security, describing some of the historic storms that have hit the area, including the . He also described an 1821 hurricane that was "the worst hurricane to hit south Jersey...supposedly almost all of Cape May County was underwater."

"It has happened before, it will happen again," he said. "But we have to be prepared, just in case it is this year...should people evacuate? Yes. Every single time. Because if the storm [Irene] hadn't weakened it might be a much different story."

Skeldon, an avid Facebook and Twitter user with thousands of fans and followers on both, even conducted an informal poll about whether people will evacuate again after Hurricane Irene, to which approximately 1,000 people responded. Although the poll was not scientific, he said, 20 percent of people responded that they would not evacuate again.

Skeldon also offered an early prediction for this upcoming summer. Although this winter was the fourth warmest in more than 100 years of record keeping, including the warmest March on record, Skeldon said, he believes this summer will not be exceptionally hot.

When asked about climate change, Skeldon said that he does not believe in it, although he said he did in the 1990s. He said he does believe that the climate is always changing, and even said that it's possible that carbon emissions may slightly accelerate times of global heating or slow times of global cooling slightly, but he is not convinced that we are seeing a period of continual warming.

"I believe weather is cyclical," he said. "We've had warm spells for twenty to thirty years...I don't believe in climate change, but I'm very pro-environment, and I do believe humans need to clean up their act."

He said no meteorologist would deny that the earth's temperature went up in the 1980s and 90s, but he believes that the increase in global temperatures was just a warming cycle, and that he expects we are seeing the beginning of a cooling cycle that started during the past four or five years.

"I don't think we should be spending billions of dollars fighting something that may or may not be true," he said. "The best way to fight it is to spend the money on science to forecast the weather."

He also predicted that on average the next twenty to thirty winters will be cold.

"The earth is such a big place that currents can change and patterns can change," he said. "There's a lot of cycles...the earth, no matter what we do, is always trying to be in balance."