Are Hurricanes Getting Worse?

Scientists largely agree climate change makes some elements of hurricanes worse, but they’re less confident about others: A Dispatch Explainer.

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As Hurricane Ian demolished swaths of Florida after making landfall Wednesday, the storm also renewed debates over the connection between hurricanes and climate change. Commentary fell into predictable partisan ruts.

“If Republicans have anything to do” with climate policy in Florida, “we can kiss Palm Beach goodbye,” Ryan Cooper wrote for The American Prospect under the headline “The Climate Dystopia Is Already Here.” Meanwhile, Fox News cited the executive director of a Trump-friendly think tank to lay into Democrats for politicizing the tragedy “to promote their green agenda.”

In reality, the science of hurricanes is more nuanced than many realize, with near-unanimous agreement on some topics and question marks elsewhere. From the areas with the most scientific consensus to those with less, here’s what we know—and what we don’t.

Hurricanes are getting wetter.

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  1. Burke Hayek

    A lot of this analysis relies on trust of purported weather and climate experts. However, far from doing anything to earn trust, experts in these fields have actively destroyed trust. I can't see a reason to believe anything they say, given their behavior and demonstrated biases. Used to be, competition among scientists would promote disagreement and argument out of which some tentative likelihoods could emerge. No longer.

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  2. Michael York

    Excellent article. Actual, like, real journalism! Seeing such is analogous to having spotted a bald eagle in NYC in 1960.

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  3. Avatar photo
    The Bell Tower

    Any political position that argues electing X party will make the planet better or worse is tomfool stupidity and there’s no room for discussion on that front.

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  4. Safety Cone

    American landfall Hurricane frequency was worse in the 1920's and 1950's.

    Why not frame the question as: Is global warming making the planet better?

    And why just focus on the Atlantic? Maybe Global Warming has made Pacific typhoons less frequent too.

    Are the polar bears all dead yet? Is the Arctic ice gone? Drought, flood, desertification, coral reefs, rising seas, name your disaster, every gloomy modeled prediction about CO2 and global warming fails as more data is observed. Maybe the assumption that it's bad is the part that needs addressing.

    Or maybe we haven't got a clue and are hanging way too much significance on CO2 going from 3 parts per 10,000 all the way up to 4 parts per 10,000 in the gaseous 5% of the atmosphere.

    Was it our fossil fuels that melted the mile of ice that once sat atop Manhattan? Over the last million years, multiple freezes lasting 100,000 years descended, we don’t know why. Between them were 10,000 year thaws, either as warm or warmer than today and at lower co2 concentrations. We don't know why.

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  5. Mark

    Storm intensity or energy displaced is actually measurable. If you look at just hurricanes it is possible but not really statistically significant. Kind of like saying temperatures have increased over the last 20 years but if you add in those things called confidence intervals...not really. The measure of total atmospheric energy generated but all sorts of events like tornadoes ect shows an actual decrease. Not consistent with the narrative I know but science or true science doesn't have one of those. Still ask Galileo how going against the "science" of the day worked out for him...

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  6. Avatar photo
    Michael

    corrections to the misinformation.

    Water on the west coast of Florida has risen 5" in 40 years, not 6-8". Don't rely on a political agency such as the EPA when you need the truth. The NOAA is the source of the data. They're the best agency to source your data.
    https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_station.shtml?id=8725110

    If one judiciously trims the data, one can cause a plot to dance in any direction. Hurricane data is not different. If one looks at the longer record, hurricane count is down. https://wattsupwiththat.com/2022/09/30/nytimes-hurricane-analysis-is-purposefully-misleading/
    Here is the last chart from NOAA (2019), which I presume means this data is impolitic https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/monitoring/monthly-report/tropical-cyclones/201913

    I noticed the NOAA has stopped tracking ENSO El Nino Southern Oscillations. This natural weather phenomenon contradicts a lot of climate change orthodoxy, hence I presume this is the cause of it's ouster.

    The very sad fact is, friends, we are being lied to: “We own the science, and we think that the world should know it, and the platforms themselves also do.”
    --Melissa Fleming, Under-Secretary for Global Communications at the United Nations, speaking at WEF Sustainable Development Impact Meetings, 2022.

    “We partnered with Google. For example, if you Google ‘climate change,’ you will, at the top of your search, you will get all kinds of UN resources”
    --Melissa Fleming, Under-Secretary for Global Communications at the United Nations, speaking at WEF Sustainable Development Impact Meetings, 2022.

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  7. Duane Truitt

    So much in this that is utter BS. It is impossible for “global warming” to have caused any measurable increase in either the intensity or frequency of tropical cyclones. Actual warming to date since the end of WW Two is but a tiny fraction of 1 degree C. There was no substantial increase in atmospheric CO2 before 1945 when the world became electrified and motorized..

    The warmunists always claim 1850 as their baseline for warming, but they simply cherry picked the end of the Little Ice Age as their baseline. If the beginning of the Little Ice Age, in the 15th century was used as baseline, there would be zero warming at all.

    Even the UN’s own global warming working group (IPCC) in their most recent report admits that there are NO DATA in support of the false notion that global warming has caused an increase in the frequency or intensity of extreme weather events, including hurricanes.

    Hurricane Ian was a very destructive storm - I experienced it directly this week..

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    1. Duane Truitt

      But it is not the climate that changed over the centuries - it is the extremely heavy development of coastal Florida that has changed over time.

      Colombus suffered through at least two extreme hurricanes in the 1490s off Hispaniola (now Haiti/Dominican Republic). The Treasure Coast of SE Florida is so named because a horrible hurricane destroyed a Spanish treasure fleet in the early 18th century. Galveston TX was completely destroyed by storm surge in 1900, and a series of devastating hurricanes destroyed much of Tampa, the FL Keys and Lake Okeechobee in the 1920s and 1930s.

      The population of Florida a century ago was less than 1 million, while today it is more than 21 million, 85% of which lives along the coastline.

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  8. AHenry

    Thanks. This is really good. How significant is 40 years of data? How far back does hurricane data go?

    NOAA data is interesting but the agency has a vested interest in highlighting problems that need further study.

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    1. Duane Truitt

      The UN’s IPCC conducted extensive analysis of storm and weather data going back centuries and concluded that there is no relationship between claimed global warming and the frequency and intensity of extreme storm events including tropical cyclones. None.

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      MarqueG68

      The lack of satellite data prior to around 1980 is a serious shortcoming. But there were data prior to that: it was based on observations from aviation and--for much longer still--from shipping. The obvious problem here is that the information was much patchier the farther you go back in time. Many of the historical hurricane records going back into the early 20th Century and earlier are based on land-falling hurricanes recorded along the eastern seaboard. And the instruments used to measure the meteorological details such as air pressure, temperature, sustained wind speeds, gusting wind speeds, and so on, were not accurate instruments by today's standards. As a result, a lot of the historical hurricane record going back into the 1800s and earlier are based almost entirely on weather conditions being reconstructed based on patchy historical observations. And prior to, say, 1800, the entire rest of human existence for over 200,000 years we know virtually nothing about hurricane activity with any precision exceeding guesswork.

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  9. Jim Carson

    Dear Mr. Explainer Person, can you please explain why the very scientists you quote in this article (NOAA, CSU, et.al.) have wildly overpredicted the number of hurricanes so far in 2022? They predicted 14-21 named storms. We're very unlikely to get anywhere near that.

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      MarqueG68

      Rule 1: Predictions are hard--especially about the future!

      Rule 2: When you've got a prominent platform from which to make disaster predictions, you don't want to look foolish as the low-estimate outlier when the hurricane season entails one Cat 5 storm battering a coastal city every week or two for months!

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  10. Jim Carson

    I assume Richard Lindzen, Ryan Maue, Roger Pielke, Jr. and many others who disagree were unavailable for comment.

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