Analysis: No, hurricanes are not getting more dangerous

No, hurricanes are not getting more dangerous

By Andrew Montford

The landfall of Hurricane Helene on the US Gulf Coast this weekend has prompted an all too predictable outbreak of climate hysteria in the mainstream media. That there have been many fatalities and widespread damage is indisputable – and of course terribly tragic – but killing people and wrecking things is sadly what hurricanes do. These risks are part and parcel of living in the south-eastern United States, the northern Bay of Bengal, or the coasts of China or the Philippines, and they always have been. Not that you would know that from the news reporting on Helene, which has been consistently alarmist and agenda-driven.

The BBC has described Helene as ‘one of the biggest ever storms to hit the US Gulf Coast, with wind gust speeds of 140 mph’. That’s true, but it is still quite a long way behind the 150mph of Camille in 1969, or the 160mph of the Labor Day hurricane of 1935, both of which hit the US before climate change was deemed a major concern.

The use of hurricanes to spread fear and alarm about global warming has a long and dishonourable history, going back to Al Gore’s 2006 film, An Inconvenient Truth, and beyond. Gore’s genius was in recognising how he could leverage the then recent disaster of Hurricane Katrina and the subsequent flooding of New Orleans to push his climate message. So successful was the approach that the alleged effects of fossil-fuel emissions on extreme weather are now treated as undisputed fact. We are told, ad nauseam, that hurricanes, droughts, floods and everything else have become worse, and that scientists, having pored over the entrails of their computer climate simulations, are sure that they are going to become worse still.

This mixture of environmentalist fibs and scientific hype is hard to untangle, but it is worth taking the time to understand what is known and what is speculation. We also need to ask some hard questions about the ability of climate scientists to actually forecast hurricane activity in any meaningful way.

Each year, hurricane forecasters issue their annual predictions for the Atlantic hurricane season. This year, with the Earth experiencing a temperature spike, there was near unanimity among forecasters that the Atlantic would experience a remarkable jump in hurricane activity, with one news outlet saying this would be a ‘supercharged’ hurricane season. However, the reality thus far, with two-thirds of the season behind us, is that it has been no more eventful than average. Meanwhile, activity in the world’s other oceans has been uniformly low. So much for ‘supercharged’ hurricanes.

Longer-term predictions of hurricane activity have been little better. While the periodic reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) insist, with monotonous regularity, that storms will become more intense in future, the data up to now show nothing to suggest that this is correct. If you were to plot a trend over the past 30 years, you would say that, if anything, hurricanes are becoming less frequent and less intense. In truth, records of hurricane activity, like all weather and climate data, are highly variable, trending up or down (or staying the same) for years or decades at a time, then flipping from one ‘regime’ to another, often without apparent cause. You therefore have to be extremely cautious about drawing conclusions.

Still, however you look at the data, there is currently very little to justify all the media scaremongering about hurricanes. Indeed, a few years after Al Gore’s film, hurricane activity had fallen close to its lowest level on record. (A few years later it soared for a few years, before falling back to extremely low levels again more recently.)

Nor are hurricanes causing more damage than they used to, although activists like to claim the opposite. To do so, they usually rely on data that hasn’t been corrected for two confounding trends – the growing populations in the path of hurricanes and their growing wealth. Far more people, and far more wealth, is concentrated in places like coastal Florida than 100 years ago, leading to what Bjorn Lomborg calls the ‘expanding bullseye effect’, which gives the impression of more frequent and worse hurricanes, despite what the data actually show.

Thankfully, growing wealth – even in poorer countries that are most vulnerable to extreme weather – has significantly reduced the adverse effects of hurricanes. The Bhola hurricane of 1970 is thought to have killed around half a million Bangladeshis, either directly or indirectly. Cyclone Amphan in 2020 was an extremely powerful storm, but it caused just over a hundred fatalities when it hit eastern India and Bangladesh. People were able to be evacuated ahead of the storm and could then return to homes that had been built to withstand the winds, and to water supplies that had been made safe against flood waters. Farms were also protected by sea walls, unlike in the 1970s. Despite being a so-called super-cyclone, the whole event went largely unnoticed in the West.

The same story could be told of other forms of extreme weather, too. According to alarmists, everything is supposed to get worse – flood, drought, rainfall, you name it – but the data shows that none of this has happened yet. Moreover, this is the official view of the IPCC. If you examine the underlying detail of the 2023 report, you are struck less by the small number of things that have changed as a result of global warming – extreme heat and cold, and a few others – and more by the enormous number that haven’t. The IPCC has ‘low confidence’ that the following have worsened or will worsen as a result of global warming: frost, mean precipitation, river floods, heavy rain and flash floods, landslides, aridity, hydrological drought, agricultural and ecological drought, fire weather, mean wind speeds, severe wind storms, tropical cyclones, sand and dust storms, snow, glaciers and ice sheets, heavy snow, ice storms, hail and avalanches. In other words, most forms of extreme weather.

The mainstream media’s alarmist reporting is a long way from reality.

Andrew Montford is director of Net Zero Watch.

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