No Kamala, Hurricanes are Not Getting Worse Due to Climate Change

Guest Post By Hunter Cobb

As Hurricane Helene devastated the Southeast and Hurricane Milton is bearing down on Florida, the media, as expected, is trying to blame climate change (in line with past claims by Kamala Harris and Tim Walz). These are simply lies. The reality is there is no evidence hurricanes are getting worse in response to the slight warming we've seen over the past couple hundred years.

Even the U.S. Government’s own 2014 National Climate Assessment admitted, “there has been no significant trend in the global number of tropical cyclones nor has any trend been identified in the number of U.S. land-falling hurricanes.” And the UN's infamous IPCC, admitted in their 2018 interim report, “[there is] only low confidence for the attribution of any detectable changes in tropical cyclone activity to anthropogenic influences.”*

This is abundantly clear when you simply look at global counts of hurricanes and cycles each year or measurements of total energy of hurricanes and cyclones each year (using the "accumulated cyclone energy" (ACE) metric). There is absolutely no upward trend corresponding to increasing CO2 levels. The work on global tropical cyclone activity by Dr. Ryan N. Maue provides some excellent graphs showing this clearly.

Global Tropical Cyclone Activity | Ryan Maue

Ryan Maue

In the spring of this year, some meteorologists were forecasting 2024 would be a bad year for hurricanes. But, this was based on known ocean cycles which have nothing to do with climate change (specifically the Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation). This was a basic forecast, unrelated to how much CO2 your car, your lawnmower, or the local power plant puts into the atmosphere. While it’s true there has been a gradual increase in the earth’s temperature, human activity is only a minor factor in causing this. And there is no observational evidence for an increase in hurricanes or cyclones in response to this slight warming. It’s time Americans disavow the pagan religion of “climate change” and get a bit smarter. And we may soon have leaders in Washington who will stand up to this nonsense.

*These quotes are unfortunately not representative of the final claims that get attributed to the U.S. Government’s National Climate Assessment or the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). In both organizations, many competent scientists contribute to the making of their assessments. However, the often complex and nuanced work of the individual scientists is edited and condensed by a selected team of scientists into an “assessment report,” which often glosses over many of the nuances and in some cases emphasizes an illegitimate bias of a writer of the assessment. The assessment reports are then taken by science reporters of the popular press, who also often have a bias which further exaggerates a message. This process is well described in the book, “Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters,” by Steven Koonin.