In September 2019 I encountered a New York Times opinion piece by David Leonhardt that suggested that “Hurricanes Are Getting Worse” (the title of the article) and that this was caused by global climate change. Not long after, in November of that same year, I encountered another opinion in the same paper that seemed to assume the correctness of the first: that climate change was making hurricanes worse, and that this could explain why “New York City’s subway system did not flood in its first 108 years, but Hurricane Sandy’s 2012 storm surge caused nearly $5 billion in water damage”.
Being a natural skeptic, I decided to crunch the numbers to verify if indeed climate change was affecting hurricanes.
Before I dive into the results, I must offer a disclaimer. In debates regarding climate change, one of the most fallacious means used by climate extremists is to accuse those who question the validity of man-made global warming of not caring about the environment. This technique is used because it effectively moves the debate from a scientific issue to a moral issue. Well-meaning people, rightfully not wanting to appear immoral, jump on the bandwagon, and the extremists have won the debate.
Due to this oft-used accusation, I must preface with a few points:
I care very deeply about conservation and the environment. I believe everyone should waste less, recycle more, refrain from littering, respect nature, and reduce their personal impact on the environment.
I am not “anti-science”. I believe firmly in the scientific method and its ability to assist humans in obtaining and understanding truth through reasoned empiricism.
In this article, I question merely the various claims that (1) hurricanes are getting worse (I will demonstrate that they aren’t) and (2) this is caused by climate change.
When I first began these computations in late 2019, I failed to publish them. Time elapsed and I figured the publication of my assessment to be irrelevant until I encountered Kendra Pierre-Louis’s May 2022 report in The Atlantic. She states, “as a climate reporter… I have to understand the interplay between the ice poles and sea-level rising, and the ways that temperature changes in the ocean can lead to changes in the atmosphere (see: hurricanes).” She provides no citation or link to evidence backing this claim, as she does with other information she presents. The claim that hurricanes have changed is stated as a matter of common knowledge, a throw-away comment that needs no verification. In a similar vein, New York Times reported in August 2021 that “Climate Change Is Making Hurricanes Stronger, Researchers Find'', but failed to mention that the 28-year homogenized record of tropical storm data failed to show statistical significance at the 95% confidence interval, and that the researchers themselves admit that “The global instrumental record of TC intensity… is generally unsuitable for global trend analysis”.
These dishonest reports from recent years have inspired me to resurrect my data analysis from 2019, and provide some additional statistics from recent years.
Statistics were pulled from the National Hurricane Center database. I used 1965 as my start point, since that year marks the creation of the National Hurricane Center, as well as the change of the bounds of the Atlantic hurricane season.
The calculated z-score for 2019 shows that there has been no increase in hurricanes in general in 2019; and although there was an increase in depressions, tropical storms, and Cat 3+ hurricanes, this increase was not statistically significant at the .05 level: meaning that there is a 95% probability that these differences in the 2019 hurricane season are due random variability, accident or chance.
Leonhardt admits that “the warming of the planet does not appear to be increasing the total number of hurricanes…” and continues, “but it does seem to be making those storms stronger”—a claim that clearly is untrue, given there was no statistically significant increase in Cat 3+ hurricanes—“and causing them to produce much more rain.” While average storm total rainfall (ASTR) is a consideration in tropical storm analysis, Leonhardt fails to show that ASTR was higher in the 2019 hurricane season than in previous seasons. He links another NYT opinion written by himself as his “evidence”—a write-up that is not specific to hurricanes but addresses the increase of extreme rainstorms in general. When the reader encounters the single paragraph about hurricanes, statistics on the ASTR are noticeably absent. Yet, the claim is made “Irma and Harvey weren’t caused by climate change, but they almost certainly would not have been so powerful if the air and the seas fueling them hadn’t been so warm”—a fallacy of the counterfactual that would put even Robert Fogel to shame. Leohardt backs up this falsifiable assumption of what he postulates would definitively occur in an alternate universe with a link to an infographic on how the average temperature of the Winter Olympics has increased since 1950. If you cannot follow the logic of how warmer Winter Olympics necessarily equates to increased rainfall in hurricanes, you are not alone. The train of evidence is weak and nonsensical.
The claim that climate change is making hurricanes “worse”—a claim that is inconsistent in its definition of “worse” in each media report—was a claim that emerged in 2019 on spurious evidence and now is set forth as unadulterated fact by the mass media, including NPR, and has no factual basis.
What has occurred since 2019?
In 2020 we did see an increase in all four metrics, all of which are statistically significant at the .05 level and 95% confidence interval. However, for 2021, we see no statistical significance in any metrics. What this means is that the difference in metrics in 2021 can be concluded to have been due to chance, and the difference in 2020 was not due to chance.
In other words, there was some variable in 2020 that was not present in 2021, or 2019 and previous years. However, this tells us very little. It only informs us that a variable existed in 2020 that was not present previously; it does not tell us what this variable was. Whether it was increased global temperature, wind speed, ocean currents, etc. is anyone’s guess. Whether whatever unique variable is responsible for the increase in 2020 was anthropogenic is to guess further still.
To conclude that hurricanes are “getting” worse, which is to imply a continuing trend, based on 2020 alone would be inaccurate. The best one could say is that hurricanes were worse (or at least in greater numbers) in 2020. Nothing much more than that can be extrapolated from the data.
This is just one example of how mass media and climate hysteria have duped the general populace with a false narrative built on unsubstantiated claims.
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