Noted Connecticut weatherman Art Horn has a habit of vacationing in places that are later hit by major hurricanes, from Jamaica to Nova Scotia, but not including Myanmar whose cyclone hit four days before Horn gave his talk on "Hurricane! The Ultimate Storm," Tuesday at Greenwich Library.

He arrived with the latest Myanmar statistics of more than 22,000 dead and 40,000 or more missing. He proceeded with dire images of the power of hurricanes to wreak havoc, the latest predictions of what foul weather was in store, and finally shared his contrary-to-popular opinion views on global warming.

"The real inconvenient truth," he said, disputing the current weather prognosticators, was that "hurricanes are not increasing in numbers or frequency."

The devastation in New Orleans was not caused by Katrina, he said, but by the fact the city's levees had not held. "Had the levees held, there would not have been anything (damage) of any consequence. It wasn't from the wind."

Targeting Al Gore, Horn said that the frequency and strength of such hurricanes as Katrina were not increasing due to global warming effects. Since cameras were put into space in the 1960s, Horn said, "there has been no increase in the number

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of Atlantic hurricanes in the U.S.," nor has there been since 1900.

The primary indicator of the frequency and the size of hurricanes, he explained, was found in ocean temperatures. "Right now, the Pacific has gone cold," said Horn.

Since the mid-1970s, he said, the Pacific had been in a warm phase. "Warm oceans bring more hurricanes." Warmer oceans produce El Nino events and warm the atmosphere. A colder Pacific will bring cooler global temperatures.

Horn's findings are in direct contrast to the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, he said, which predicts a warming of the earth from 4-10 degrees over the next 100 years. The panel, he said, was basing its predictions on faulty computer models.

"Those computers models say there's a warming trend of the atmosphere at 20,000 or more feet above the equator," he said, "but the models don't remotely resemble the real-world feedback, which show temperatures actually decreasing."

Horn accused the government's weather predicting and study agency, the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NOAA), of encouraging global warming findings as "they are more likely to get funding," said Horn. Since 1990, he reported, the agency had spent $50 billion to study global warming.

For Horn, global warming was a self-perpetuating "multi-million dollar industry." He cited Al Gore's film, "The Inconvenient Truth," as a mechanism "to promote his "$5 billion hedge fund, Generation Investment Management, in London."

Neither did Horn's weather findings see a problem with the melting ice in the Antarctic. The amount of ice on the continent was increasing, not decreasing. And, in the Arctic, the population of polar bears has doubled since their number 40 years ago, he noted.

"Environmental groups have sued the EPA," he said, "to get them on the endangered list because of what they think will happen to them in the future. Getting that listing gives the environmental groups far reaching power to dictate policy. The environmental groups are using global warming to expand their power to save nature from the enemy, you and I."

He also had harsh words for the news media for their "abysmally biased global warming reporting."

"They love a good disaster story," he said, like the melting glaciers. "They're not in the news business; they're in the lying business."

And he chastised the government for trying to forecast too far in advance. "It hurts the credibility of weather forecasts, he said. The Internet was also to blame "for offering so many forecasts. The information age is the disinformation age."

Horn spent 13 years with NBC's Channel 30 in Hartford and has won an Emmy for a documentary on hurricanes for CPTV. He has turned his craft in weather forecasting into a business, "The Art of Weather," giving talks before groups and on cruise liners - and lately before the Connecticut state legislature on the topic of global warming.

He was introduced by the library's oral historian, Carl White, who still remembers the day his grandmother showed him a 30-foot-high marker on a building in downtown Providence, R.I., of how high the water rose during the 1938 hurricane.

Horn had photographs of that hurricane's effect on Connecticut, how it had taken three out of four trees down in the state. The storm claimed 600-700 lives in the region; New London County was hit the hardest. "In Connecticut, the farther west you live," he said, "the safer you are."

Horn has settled in Manchester.