CNN Pushes Weather Porn With Climate Change And Hurricanes
Over the weekend Google news heavily promoted a story on CNN, titled “How the climate crisis is changing hurricanes,” which claimed human-caused climate change is making hurricanes worse.
This is false.
Real-world data shows during the recent period of modest warming, hurricanes have neither become more frequent nor more severe.
“In the same week that Tropical Storm Fred caused catastrophic flooding in North Carolina, and Hurricane Grace made its second landfall in Mexico, Hurricane Henri is barreling toward New England, where it’s expected to be the first to make landfall there in 30 years,” writes CNN.
This is yet another example where climate alarmists in the mainstream media are following former White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel’s admonishment to Democratic Party leaders to “never let a crisis go to waste.”
In fact, although Henri (pictured) briefly attained Hurricane 1 level strength over the Atlantic Ocean for less than 24 hours, by the time it made landfall in New England, it was a diminishing tropical storm.
The last hurricane to strike New England was Bob in 1991, 30 years ago. As a result, at present and despite modest warming, New England is currently experiencing the second-longest period in recorded history without a hurricane making landfall in the region.
“Hurricanes — also called tropical cyclones or typhoons outside North America — are enormous heat engines of wind and rain that feed on warm ocean water and moist air. And scientists say the climate crisis is making them more potent,” continued CNN. “The proportion of high-intensity hurricanes has increased due to warmer global temperatures, according to a UN climate report released earlier this month. Scientists have also found that the storms are more likely to stall and lead to devastating rainfall and they last longer after making landfall.”
The old get-out-of-jail-free card – ‘scientists say‘.
Data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Hurricane Center (who both do actually employ scientists) show hurricanes have neither become more numerous or more powerful during the past half-century of modest warming.
EPA’s May 2021 report, titled “Climate Change Indicators: Tropical Cyclone Activity,” reported:
“Since 1878, about six to seven hurricanes have formed in the North Atlantic every year. Roughly two per year make landfall in the United States. The total number of hurricanes (particularly after being adjusted for improvements in observation methods) and the number reaching the United States do not indicate a clear overall trend since 1878.”
The EPA’s conclusion that hurricanes have not become more numerous in recent years is unsurprising because the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2018 interim report came to essentially the same conclusion.
As illustrated in figure 1 below, IPCC data demonstrates no increasing trend in tropical cyclones or hurricane numbers.
Figure 1, Tropical cyclone frequency. Dr. Ryan Maue
While there has been a slight increase in the number of cyclones since 2011, there are still less now than there were in 1972, and there has been no upward trend since records began in 1971.
NHC data indicate hurricane impacts on the United States are at an all-time low. The United States recently went more than a decade, 2005 through 2017, without experiencing a major hurricane measuring Category 3 or higher, making landfall—the longest such period in recorded history.
This can be seen in Figure 2 below showing the large gap with no major landfalling hurricanes (Category3 or greater) in the U.S. on the right-hand side.
Figure 2 Landfalling hurricanes category 3 or greater. Dr. Roger Pielke Jr.
The media and alarmists did report on this lull, not as good news, but as a warning this definately meant there would be more of them in the future and they would be bigger. No evidence was provided to support this claim of course, we were just supposed to accept it as proven because ‘scientists say’.
Two recent studies, one published in Nature Communications and one by the NHC show any reported increase in tropical storm numbers is due to technological improvements in discovering, measuring, and tracking storms when they are far from land, not due to an actual increase in tropical storms or hurricane formation.
As explained in Climate at a Glance: Hurricanes, warm ocean water is just one factor driving the formation and intensification of hurricanes.
Wind shear inhibits strong storms from forming and rips apart storms that have already formed. Science indicates global warming is likely to cause more wind shear in places where hurricanes form and intensify.
This is precisely what happened to Henri, with wind shear shredding its top reducing it from a minor hurricane to a tropical depression in a relatively short period of time.
Evidence that tropical cyclones are unlikely to become more severe in the future also comes from a recent study published in the peer-reviewed journal, Geophysical Research Letters.
Its authors report that after accounting for the combined size and maximum wind speeds of hurricanes—a storm’s “kinetic energy”— climate models project no measurable worsening of future hurricanes if the earth continues to warm.
“Comparing cyclone integrated kinetic energy between present conditions and a projected future climate scenario did not suggest notable changes between the two periods,” say the researchers.
The IPCC’s recent AR6 report says relatively little about hurricanes and tropical storms, but what it does say is highly uncertain or equivocal.
Reporting on trends in tropical storm numbers and intensities on page 58 of Chapter Eight of AR6, IPCC does not report anything has changed since it wrote in AR5, the organization had “low confidence in centennial changes in tropical cyclone activity globally, and in the attribution of observed changes.”
This directly contradicts CNN’s claim that the AR6 report shows hurricanes are becoming more intense due to human climate change.
Based on “limited evidence,” AR6 says it has “medium confidence” that tropical storms may be dropping more rainfall on land because the speed with which tropical storms are traveling may be slowing somewhat.
In other words, they really don’t know.
This claim is far from definitive and certainly doesn’t merit CNN staking its reputation on by claiming scientists have definitively determined slow traveling hurricanes are dumping more rainfall on land.
No such certainty appears in IPCC AR6.
Interestingly, from July 9 to August 11, during the middle of the annual hurricane season, the Atlantic Basin experienced a more than month-long lull of tropical storms, when not a single tropical storm formed.
Where were the reports from CNN and other mainstream media outlets linking this unusual tropical storm drought to climate change?
They were silent as usual, as it is now blindingly obvious they deliberately do not report anything that could be considered good news.
All bold emphasis added
See more here: climatechangedispatch.com
Header image: Politico
Please Donate Below To Support Our Ongoing Work To Defend The Scientific Method
PRINCIPIA SCIENTIFIC INTERNATIONAL, legally registered in the UK as a company 
incorporated for charitable purposes. Head Office: 27 Old Gloucester Street, London WC1N 3AX.
Trackback from your site.
Andy
| #
Hogwash.
Reply
richard
| #
Tosh-
Tornadoes-
“With increased National Doppler radar coverage, increasing population, and greater attention to tornado reporting, there has been an increase in the number of tornado reports over the past several decades. This can create a misleading appearance of an increasing trend in tornado frequency. To better understand the variability and trend in tornado frequency in the United States, the total number of EF-1 and stronger, as well as strong to violent tornadoes (EF-3 to EF-5 category on the Enhanced Fujita scale) can be analyzed. These tornadoes would have likely been reported even during the decades before Doppler radar use became widespread and practices resulted in increasing tornado reports. The bar charts below indicate there has been little trend in the frequency of the stronger tornadoes over the past 55 years”
https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/climate-information/extreme-events/us-tornado-climatology/trends
Hurricanes-
“NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dyamics Laboratory (GFDL): “Leaders in Climate Model Development and Research.” See their website.
For about a decade (or even longer), GFDL has annually updated their statement on hurricanes and climate change. This excerpt from their 15 August 2019 update lists some of their negative findings about current hurricane activity.
“We find that, after adjusting for such an estimated number of missing storms, there remains just a small nominally positive upward trend in tropical storm occurrence from 1878-2006. Statistical tests indicate that this trend is not significantly distinguishable from zero. In addition, Landsea et al. (2010) note that the rising trend in Atlantic tropical storm counts is almost entirely due to increases in short-duration (<2 day) storms alone. Such short does not provide compelling evidence for a substantial greenhouse warming-induced long-term increase.“-lived storms were particularly likely to have been overlooked in the earlier parts of the record, as they would have had less opportunity for chance encounters with ship traffic. …
“The evidence for an upward trend is even weaker if we look at U.S. landfalling hurricanes, which even show a slight negative trend beginning from 1900 or from the late 1800s. …
“While major hurricanes show more evidence of a rising trend from the late 1800s, the major hurricane data are considered even less reliable than the other two records in the early parts of the record. …
Reply
richard
| #
cont.. “In short, the historical Atlantic hurricane frequency record does not provide compelling evidence for a substantial greenhouse warming-induced long-term increase.“
Reply
slandermen
| #
The first shit I coded happened to be fluid dynamics. When I was like 18 years old, first c app I wrote. Dropped out of school when I was 15, as an alcoholic.
Though it’s only after I started smoking marijuana that I truly understood things.
Ask Einstein, Feynman, Sagan and such. Can you even?
Reply
slandermen
| #
Ask the climate scientologists, why they can’t seem to observe exploding greenhouses in practiee.
Just think about it. There are many green houses. According to their logic, if you add any co2 over like 300ppm, the temperature just exponentially increases and the greenhouse explodes. Because potatoes.
Reply
slandermen
| #
Literally runaway exploding greenhouses. It’s one of the common modern urban threats. You’d be driving your car and some random greenhouse would jump in front of you “I’m a fucking terrorist” and explode. Many vegetables were tragically lost…thanks to homogenization.
Reply
Carbon Bigfoot
| #
Richard….AMEN
Reply
Brian James
| #
Aug.30.2021 Geomagnetic Storm Watch, Eye-Wall Lightning, Climate Punches | S0 News
Daily Sun, Earth and Science News!
https://youtu.be/PfklIXjGFxM
Reply