Hurricanes

An August 2019 NOAA statement concluded, “It is premature to conclude . . . that global warming has already had a detectable impact on hurricane activity.” The NOAA statement added that U.S. landfalling hurricanes “‘show a slight negative trend’ since ‘late 1800s.’”65

Norwegian professor Ole Humlum explained in his 2020 State of the Climate Report: “Tropical storms and hurricanes have displayed large annual variations in accumulated cyclone energy (ACE) since 1970, but there has been no overall trend towards either lower or higher activity. The same applies for the number of continental hurricane landfalls in the USA, in a record going back to 1851.”67

…

In 2019, extreme-weather expert Roger Pielke Jr. noted that the federal National Climate Assessment released in 2018 ignored one of its own expert reviewers, who wrote: “National Hurricane Center going back to the 1800s data clearly indicate a drop in the decadal rate of US landfalling hurricanes since the 1960s…instead you spin the topic to make it sound like the trends are all towards more cyclones.”68

The WMO (World Meteorological Organization) said, “No observational studies have provided convincing evidence of a detectable anthropogenic influence specifically on hurricane-related precipitation.” The WMO assessment concluded that “anthropogenic signals are not yet clearly detectable in observations for most TC (tropical cyclones) metrics.”69

A study by NOAA hurricane researcher Chris Landsea found that “only 2 of these [recent] 10 Category 5s would have been recorded as Cat 5 if they had occurred during the late-1940s period.”70

Hurricane Maria, which hit Puerto Rico in 2017, with the eighth-lowest landfall pressure (917 MB) on record in the Atlantic Basin, was not an unprecedented storm. Meteorologist Anthony Watts noted, “With Irma ranked 7th, and Harvey ranked 18th, it’s going to be tough for climate alarmists to try connecting these two storms to being driven by CO2/global warming. But they’ll do it anyway.”

Pielke noted in 2019 that the “13 yrs ending 2018 had the fewest Cat 3+ USA landfalls since 1900 with 3….3 periods had 12, most recently 1915–1927. 13 yrs ending in 2018 saw a 14 total Cat 1+ (tied 2nd fewest). The most? 33: 1938–1950.”71

Meteorologist Paul Dorian noted that despite a very active Atlantic hurricane season in 2020, the “Pacific hurricane season was well below normal” and overall global hurricane activity was “below normal.”72

Climate analyst Kenneth Richard’s 2018 survey of scientific literature found, “The peer-reviewed scientific literature robustly affirms that land-falling hurricane frequencies and intensities have remained steady or declined in recent decades. So have droughts, floods, and other extreme weather events.”

Atmospheric research scientist Philip Klotzbach’s research also found no trend in global accumulated cyclone energy (ACE) in the past thirty years.73

…