Cooling Doomsday Rhetoric Affords Rational View of Climate
With no guarantees, forecasters tend to be optimistic that the new hurricane season which began on June 1 and theoretically ends on Nov. 30 will again – like last year – be relatively inactive.
The 2025 season ended with no Atlantic hurricanes making landfall in the continental U.S., the first time this has occurred since 2015.
Although last year’s season produced five hurricanes, all were steered away from the U.S. coastline by naturally occurring atmospheric conditions driven by a strong El Niño pattern.
The opposite is true in the Pacific which may likely have a relatively active season.
El Niño is an entirely natural ocean cycle that causes warm surface temperatures in the tropical Pacific Ocean which stimulates hurricane formations through its influence on vertical wind shear – the difference between wind speed or direction at different layers of the atmosphere.
Atlantic Hurricanes thrive when there’s low wind shear that allows storms to build a cohesive rotation and to circulate heat and moisture toward the center, whereas the opposite pattern occurs in the Pacific.
Forecasters at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) estimate that this year will experience between three to six Atlantic hurricanes.
NOAA’s forecast aligns with many other experts’ analyses, which say that El Niño conditions will again likely dampen hurricane activity in the Atlantic.
The Barcelona Supercomputing Center, which tracks predictions from 23 hurricane forecasting centers, projects an average of five.
In May, following decades of fearmongering, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) quietly discarded dire rising temperature scenarios promoted in their past two reports.
As IPCC’s most recent report admits, “For the 21st century, this range will be smaller than as assessed before,” noting that their worst forecasts “have become implausible.”
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates who has dedicated billions of dollars, fomenting climate change alarm is finally also pushing back against what he now calls a “doomsday outlook” regarding a warming planet.
In October of 2025 he posted an article on his website stating: “Fortunately for all of us, this view is wrong. Although climate change will have serious consequences – particularly for people in the poorest countries – it will not lead to humanity’s demise.”
Gates added, “Unfortunately, the doomsday outlook is causing much of the climate community to focus too much on near-term emissions goals, and it’s diverting resources from the most effective things we should be doing to improve life in a warming world.”
But what about claims by eminent authorities that hurricanes and other extreme weather events are becoming ever more frequent and severe because of global warming we humans are causing?
Those of us who have questioned this dogma have been mocked and labeled as “climate deniers” and worse.
Over decades, climate realists including Steve Koonin, Michael Shellenberger, Roger Pielke Jr., and others have agreed with much of what IPCC and Bill Gates are now saying: that while the Earth’s climate is changing just as it always has – now in a warming phase – humans can and must adapt.
No one should dispute that hurricanes and other severe weather can be enormously devastating. However, the tag line connecting them with “climate change,” suggesting this to be a recent phenomenon defies undisputed records.
Let’s recognize that global temperatures were as warm or warmer 2,000 years ago during the Roman Warm Period, 1,000 years ago during the Medieval Warm Period, and even a smidgen warmer in the comparatively recent 1930s.
That was followed by three decades of cooling which began in the mid-1940s despite World War II weapons industries having released massive amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere and had leading scientific and news organizations predicting the onset of the next Ice Age by the late 1970s.
As for hurricanes, the deadliest to hit the continental U.S. was the Galveston, Texas event of Aug. 29, 1900, which may have killed up to 12,000 people.
With no intent to make light of the foreboding trauma hurricanes bring to those in their paths — let’s nevertheless recognize that from a larger historical perspective, North Atlantic tropical storm and hurricane patterns fail to reveal any worsening trend over more than a century.
In any case, since we can’t change the weather, it’s truly in our best interests to anticipate those bad-case circumstances and prepare our communities and households to mitigate against the outcomes.
Whether or not any severe weather event gets hyped on the media as the “biggest ever,” “strongest ever,” “deadliest ever,” or “costliest ever,” it of course may qualify as the worst ever for you.
Consider this grim reality well in advance of every storm season, when there is still time to plan and take prudent preemptive actions.
Unfortunately, it’s all too easy to forget to do this on nice sunny days.
Larry Bell is an endowed professor of space architecture at the University of Houston where he founded the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture and the graduate space architecture program. His latest of 12 books is “Architectures Beyond Boxes and Boundaries: My Life By Design” (2022). Read more Larry Bell Insider articles — Click Here Now.
source www.newsmax.com