New Paper Debunks Claim That Hurricanes Are Getting Worse Due to Climate Change
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One of the climate cult’s most treasured myths is that tropical cyclones are increasing in intensity and destructive force due to so-called climate change. However, yet another paper is concluding that hurricanes and typhoons, at least thus far, are not increasing in either frequency or intensity.

Published by Paul Homewood for the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), the paper concludes that any upward trends in frequency or intensity when it comes to hurricanes, cyclones, and typhoons are likely explained by an increase in observational ability, and are definitely not due to man-made climate change.

“2021 and 2022 recorded the lowest number of both hurricanes and major hurricanes globally for any two year period since 1980,” the paper declares. “The apparent long-term increase in the number of hurricanes since the 19th century has been due to changes in observational practices over the years, rather than a real increase.”

While the science is quite clear that hurricane seasons have not been deadlier or busier in the past few years, the average person might not be clear on that since media reports continually state that tropical storms are getting worse due to climate change — despite all evidence to the contrary.

Homewood suggests that the media begin telling the truth rather than the climate-hysteria narrative.

“While scientists are quite clear that we are not seeing a dramatic increase in hurricanes, or even any increase at all, the public have been conned into thinking that tropical storms are getting worse. It’s high time the mainstream media came clean and told people what is really going on,” he said.

Homewood’s paper draws pretty much the same conclusion that a 2021 study made. That study was done by scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and Princeton University.

“Due to changes in observing practices, severe inhomogeneities exist in this database, complicating the assessment of long-term changes. In particular, there has been a substantial increase in monitoring capacity over the past 170 years, so that the probability that a HU (Atlantic Hurricane) is observed is substantially higher in the present than early in the record,” the 2021 study states.

The NOAA scientists concluded that tropical storms were not becoming more intense or frequent, despite an NOAA colleague proclaiming — in the same year — that it was undeniable that hurricanes were getting worse.

“The trend is there and it is real,” NOAA researcher James P. Kossin told The New York Times. “There’s this remarkable building of this body of evidence that we’re making these storms more deleterious.”

Funny how his NOAA colleagues could infer something completely different by reviewing the same data.

Indeed, according to Homewood’s report, besides hurricanes not getting stronger or more frequent, any upturn in activity in the short term can be explained by the fact that there has been a rebound from a period of minimal hurricane activity in the 1970s.

According to Homewood’s paper: “The increase in Atlantic hurricanes in the last fifty years is not part of a long-term trend, but is simply a recovery from a deep minimum in hurricane activity in the 1970s, associated with the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation.”

So, a completely natural — and not man-made — cycle.

The new paper also shows that the Category 5 hurricanes of today may not have been classified that high back several decades.

Homewood points to a re-analysis of “ten Category 5 hurricanes, from between 1992 and 2007, [which] found that only two would have been categorised as that category using 1940s‘ technology…. Several Category 4 and 5 hurricanes would probably have been misclassified as being weaker prior to the satellite era.”

It’s important to the climate cult that people believe hurricanes and other tropical storms are getting stronger and more frequent. After all, you can’t sell the fear of climate change unless people can be shown terrifying pictures of extreme weather events, and hurricanes are among the most frightening of extreme weather.

Unfortunately for the climate cult, anyone who looks even a little bit closely at the issue of hurricanes will find that the climate emperor has no clothes. Tropical storms are not proving to be any more frequent or intense, in spite of the fervent wishes of the climate-hysteric media.