There’s nothing particularly earthshaking in this one, but we haven’t done a John Kennedy Senate hearing video in a while and this one popped up on our radar screen, so here we go.

Today’s victim is Dr. Benjamin Keys, a professor of Real Estate and Finance at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business. You’d say that since Wharton has such an excellent reputation you wouldn’t have any meatballs on the faculty spewing nonsense, but sadly, you’re wrong. Keys was brought in by the Senate Democrats to testify to the deleterious effect that climate change is having on property insurance, which is an exceedingly dumb premise – we’re in an insurance crisis because the American people all want to live close to the ocean, and we’re building super-expensive properties right where hurricanes can and will get at them. So insurance companies, which make profits by collecting premiums regularly and paying out claims sporadically, are paying out claims exceedingly regularly and that’s ruining the market.

There’s no “climate change” effect on the insurance market. There is no particular increase going on in the number or strength of the hurricanes hitting our coastlines. We might forecast and measure them more accurately than before, but generally speaking what’s happened over the past 10-20 years is pretty much the same pattern as we saw 20-30 years ago, or 120-130 years ago.

The difference is that what used to be an unspoiled beach with a pine forest just inland from it, or an estuary emptying into the Gulf of Mexico, which would get hit by a hurricane and there would be no discernible property damage, is now a high-end resort village with cottages, bungalows, condominiums, shopping areas, a marina and restaurants. So the same Cat 3 hurricane which was barely noticed when its eye passed over that wilderness now does hundreds of millions, or even billions, worth of damage.

Academic grifters like to seize on this and rather than state the obvious, which is that it’s cheaper and less risky to live inland (something our forebears instinctively knew and practiced, largely because they valued dry land for its ability to produce crops, livestock and timber on which our economy was based), now we all want a waterfront view and we insist on passing the risk of that on to society, they want to do something else.

Which is to raise the climate-change bogeyman and demand funding for more and more studies and computer models to make forecasts of the damage global warming will do.

This is good for the academic grifters. It’s an utter waste for everybody else.

Kennedy gets this, and so when the Senate Democrats send Keys to the table to spout nonsense about climate change he sighs and then relentlessly pummels the professor until the chairman of the committee, the ridiculous and corrupt Sheldon Whitehouse, finally steps in and whines that Kennedy always goes over his time.

Which is not something that particularly bothers Kennedy, especially since he knows this is among the last hearings he’ll have to put up with Whitehouse as the chair for quite a while.