OPINION:
Hurricane Idalia made landfall in Florida on Wednesday, as Hurricane Franklin threatens to stir the Atlantic.
That’s a sure sign we are about to be inundated with another tidal wave of climate hyperventilation from television news anchors and political pundits.
The best defense against this sort of “climate change” onslaught is not deploying sandbags but rather a healthy dose of following the science.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in May provided an important observation about hurricane season: “We conclude that the historical Atlantic hurricane data at this stage do not provide compelling evidence for a substantial greenhouse warming-induced century-scale increase in: frequency of tropical storms, hurricanes, or major hurricanes, or in the proportion of hurricanes that become major hurricanes.”
Simply put, there isn’t a lot of evidence that hurricanes in the Atlantic are getting more frequent or more powerful because of climate change. Or, as NOAA’s researchers explained, “it is premature to conclude with high confidence that human-caused increases in greenhouse gases have caused a change in past Atlantic basin hurricane activity that is outside the range of natural variability.”
NOAA’s work was done by the same team that laid the foundation for the conclusions in the recent United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Working Group on tropical cyclones and hurricanes.
As noted by the inestimable Roger Pielke, the IPCC had realized by 2021 that “there is still no consensus on the relative magnitude of human and natural influences on past changes in Atlantic hurricane activity, and particularly on which factor has dominated the observed increase and it remains uncertain whether past changes in Atlantic [tropical cyclone] activity are outside the range of natural variability.”
As for the frequency of hurricanes, NOAA’s former chief scientist, Ryan Maue, charted the incidence of hurricanes worldwide. His effort revealed the number of hurricanes has gone up and down a bit over time, but there is no discernible trend other than that the last few years have ranked near the bottom with respect to the number of major hurricanes.
As for the frequency of hurricanes in the United States, it is interesting to note that President Franklin Roosevelt presided over the most hurricanes making landfall on our shores, though this is primarily because he served the longest.
Measuring by the highest average number of hurricanes per year produces a tie between Presidents William Howard Taft and Donald Trump. President Barack Obama presided over the lowest average number of hurricanes that made landfall in the lower 48.
It would be a challenge to blame the relative handful of Model T’s and Wright Flyers for the abundance of hurricanes during the Taft administration, while explaining how the proliferation of SUVs and jet travel could coincide with Mr. Obama’s period of good fortune.
But that’s the thing about climate fearmongering. It’s not rooted in a desire to understand nature’s awesome power; it’s rooted in a desire to advance a political agenda.
As the hysteria surrounding the dueling hurricanes reaches its peak, rest assured that the Category 5 onslaught of climate alarmism has nothing to do with science.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.