A remarkable weather record was broken recently. The equinox came and went this September and yet not a single hurricane had formed all year in the entire Atlantic Ocean. It’s the first time this has happened since 1914 – which was back before the satellite era, when hurricanes were more likely to go unrecorded.
September is normally peak hurricane season, when the tropical Atlantic gives birth to a series of spinning storms, dubbed hurricanes when their winds exceed 74 miles per hour. (They are usually called typhoons or cyclones in the Pacific and Indian oceans.)
One year is not a trend but longer-term data does show a slight downward trend in hurricane frequency. “The number of hurricane-strength tropical cyclones globally since 1980 has declined slightly since 1990 and hit an all-time record low in 2021,” says Chris Martz, a meteorologist the New York Post calls the “anti-Greta Thunberg.” He adds that globally, the intensity of the tropical cyclones that do form has neither increased nor decreased since 1980.
Eh? Surely hurricanes and other storms are getting worse? Saint Albert of Gore said so 20 years ago, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, and the poster for his famous movie, An Inconvenient Truth, showed a spinning hurricane (that just happened to be spinning the wrong way). NASA says, to this day, that “Hurricanes Will Become Stronger and More Intense.” Google’s AI agrees when I ask it: “Yes, scientists expect hurricanes to become more intense, destructive and wetter in the future due to climate change.”
Four decades into the era of man-made global warming and we are still waiting for this confident assertion to come true. Tropical storms are much the same as they always have been in frequency, intensity, rate of intensification and everything else. And it is no good saying, “well it just has not happened yet, but it will” – because that is not what they told us 40 years ago. James Hansen, the scientist who kicked off the whole scare, memorably said in 1988 that within 20 years there would be tape across the windows of the buildings across the street from his office in New York to stop them breaking in high winds from more intense storms. The jury is in. There is no escaping the fact that the prediction that tropical storms would get stronger and more frequent proved to be wrong, one of the most spectacularly failed predictions to come out of climate science and climate activism. It is repeated so often and so loudly that most people believe it must have come true. It has not. Period.
The prediction was based on the argument that warmer oceans must generate fiercer and more regular storms. Hurricanes only form in warm areas and warm seasons, after all. Sounds logical, but some scientists then pointed out a flaw in the reasoning. Thunderstorms are driven by warmth, yes, but major windstorms form when hot air meets cold air and the bigger the difference, the fiercer the storm. Greenhouse warming is characterized by arctic amplification, meaning there is more warming in colder latitudes, less in the tropics. By definition, then, the temperature gradient from equator to pole is flatter in a world warmed by greenhouse gases. That could mean fewer or less intense storms.
As for this year in particular, the Washington Post was quick to blame the lack of hurricanes on – you guessed it – climate change, having also blamed the very active hurricane year of 2020 on climate change. Martz says: “Climate change has become a convenient scapegoat for climastrologists to blame everything that happens with the weather. They can’t ever be wrong.” More likely, the unusually quiet Atlantic season may well be an early sign of the especially intense developing El Niño in the Pacific, which will have strong effects throughout much of the globe, making South America wetter, Australia and India drier and the whole world temporarily warmer.
Though this El Niño looks powerful, there is no obvious trend towards El Niños getting more extreme due to man-made climate change. Local effects from El Niños on agriculture, drought, flooding and wildlife can be severe. But globally they usually add up to only a small effect on world food supplies. A 2014 paper found that soybean production increased by 2.1 to 5.4 percent in El Niño years while it changes the yields of maize, rice and wheat harvest by -4.3 to 0.8 percent.
The equinox came and went and yet not a single hurricane had formed all year in the Atlantic
This year saw another surprising weather record. The temperature of the high Arctic, above 80 degrees north, was unusually low all summer. Average daily temperatures were hardly getting above freezing at all, even in July. Greenland’s ice cap lost much less ice than usual to melting this year and the Arctic Ocean’s summer ice melting was the third lowest in 20 years. Europe and much of North America had a scorching summer, but farther north it was cooler.
Roger Pielke Jr. is a climate scientist who maintains a dashboard on what’s happening to the weather as a result of climate change. A glance through it reveals a fascinating possibility: the world is warming without much affecting the rest of the weather. Pielke lists the things that have not yet noticeably changed: mean precipitation, river floods, heavy precipitation and pluvial floods, landslide, aridity, hydrological drought, agricultural and ecological drought, fire weather, mean wind speed, severe windstorms, tropical cyclones and sand and dust storms.
Yet attributing individual extreme weather events to climate change is now a common media reflex. The scientists who push this openly acknowledge that their motive is political: “Increasing the ‘immediacy’ of climate change, thereby increasing support for mitigation,” write a group of Dutch, British and Australian scientists led by Geert Jan van Oldenborgh of the Dutch meteorological institute in the journal Climate Change.
Pielke has shown that using the methods of the activist group World Weather Attribution, he can demonstrate that the record 6,776 home runs scored in major league baseball in 2019 would also have been impossible without climate change. Or that the Japanese typhoon of 2019 was made four times worse by the increase in worldwide patent applications. It is horoscope-level science.
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