It’s annual June “Hurricane Season” prediction time, and the hoopla accompanying the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) regular look at a common weather phenomenon has become more predictable than the storms: greater death and destruction driven by a changing climate.
Here are some of the headlines:
Axios: Climate change to make for threatening hurricane season, as oceans stay unusually warm.
USA Today: 2023 hurricane season: Fear rain as much as storm surge as climate change increases threat.
Yahoo News: How climate change is causing housing market chaos.
And so it goes.
Adding to the anxiety, the first named storm of the season occurred on the second day of the season. The Washington Post reported, “Tropical Storm Arlene developed about 265 miles west of Fort Myers, Fla., early Friday afternoon, according to the National Hurricane Center. The storm, packing peak winds of 40 mph, does not pose a significant threat to any land. Instead, the Hurricane Center says it will drift harmlessly southward while gradually dissipating.”
It’s all much ado about not very much. The hurricane-climate change linkage is free of evidence. Nor does the 2023 season look imposing. In fact, according to NOAA, it is likely to be “near normal.” What does that mean? “NOAA’s outlook for the 2023 Atlantic hurricane season, which goes from June 1 to November 30, predicts a 40% chance of a near-normal season, a 30% chance of an above-normal season and a 30% chance of a below-normal season.”
NOAA forecasts 12-17 “named storms,” meaning storms with winds of 39 mph or higher, with 5-9 becoming hurricanes (74 mph or higher), and 1-4 “major (category 3-5)” hurricanes with winds exceeding 110 mph.
More problematic than hurricanes is a likely El Niño this summer (the warm phase of the Pacific Ocean southern oscillation). El Niño and his nasty little sister La Niña together form the El Niño Southern Oscillation, or ENSO, phenomenon.
One of the few unbiased observers of the weather-climate linkage – often reviled by climate change evangelists – is Roger Pielke Jr., University of Colorado professor and proprietor of the excellent newsletter, The Honest Broker. In a current issue, he highlights what both NOAA and the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) say about the greenhouse gas-hurricane connection: “In short —trends in hurricane activity outside the range of documented variability have not been detected, nor is there high confidence in connections of hurricane behavior to greenhouse gas emissions.”
Don’t trust Pielke? (You should.) Here’s NOAA: “Observed hurricane data generally either do not show clear centennial-scale trends or do not cover enough years to assess century-scale trends. Pronounced multidecadal variations typically dominate over long-term (centennial-scale) trends over decadal timescales for Atlantic hurricanes.”
Here’s the IPCC: “[T]here 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 (Ting et al., 2015) and it remains uncertain whether past changes in Atlantic TC activity are outside the range of natural variability.”
And here’s a convincing graphic.
Much of the general public and climate activist handwringing about hurricanes and climate change has to do with NOAA’s misleading promotion of the increasing economic damage caused by hurricanes, something Pielke has been campaigning against for years. NOAA counts, and prominently promotes, the number of weather-related U.S. disasters that ring up a cost of $1 billion or more. Pielke writes, “The dataset is compelling clickbait because over the past three decades the count has shown a sharp increase, from five or less such disasters each year in the decade of the 1980s to fifteen or more in each of the past 3 years.” The data is so graphic that President Biden has cited it in arguing for greater efforts to reduce greenhouse gases, an entirely worthwhile goal, even if the evidence he cites is flawed.
The problem is that the “billion-dollar data” (even if adjusted for the time value of money) reflect economics, population, and land use more than the strength of storms. People still build, and rebuild, in inherently fraught places – shorelines, cliff tops, forests – population rises, and economic growth continues (thankfully). Pielke writes, “Consider that an identical hurricane making landfall in Florida in 1980 versus 2023 would result in vastly different loss totals, because today there are simply more people in more homes with more stuff than 43 years ago.”
–Kennedy Maize
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