From the climateREALISM
By Linnea Lueken
A recent CBS News story titled “Top 10 Deadliest Hurricanes in U.S. History” presents a factual discussion of the 10 deadliest hurricanes to hit the United States. Refreshingly, CBS didn't try to blame the deadly hurricanes on climate change.
The post first cites the Colorado State University Tropical Meteorology Project's prediction that this season would be “well above average” for major hurricanes making landfall in the United States and the Caribbean. While some media outlets, including CBS in other stories (covered here by Climate Realism), are trying to cram a narrative about human-caused climate change into stories about this hurricane season, that's not the case in this case. Instead, it simply lists the ten storms with the highest fatalities, and the post itself actually serves to undermine climate alarmists' claims about the “unprecedented” nature of the recent storms.
Of the ten storms listed:
- 4 happened before 1900;
- The Great Galveston Hurricane of 1900 killed the most people, killing up to 12,000 people;
- Only Katrina (1,200 deaths in Louisiana, 2005) and Maria (2,975 deaths in Puerto Rico, 2017) occurred within the last three decades.
However, it is an open question whether Maria should actually be included on the list, as the death toll from the hurricane itself stood at 64. The figure of 2,975 comes from a counterfactual attribution study, such as that previously criticized by climate realism here and here: In it, the authors examined historical death patterns in and around the time of the hurricane and attributed all additional deaths to the hurricane – an “estimate of how “Many people would have died if Hurricane Maria had not hit the island.” If attribution studies had been conducted for every single hurricane on the list, the death toll would likely have been much higher.
Helene currently has a death toll of 238, according to the report, but that number is likely to rise as more rubble is searched and missing people are identified. At the time of writing, there are no death statistics available for Milton.
No clear pattern can be seen in this data for two main reasons.
First, there is no pattern of increasingly severe storms. The available data on hurricanes and tropical cyclones simply does not show that hurricanes are becoming more intense, severe, or frequent over time. Climate Realism has covered the data dozens of times, sometimes at the state level. Even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) agrees, noting in its 2021 AR6 Working Group Report that identifying past trends in tropical storm metrics is “challenging.”
There has been no trend in global tropical cyclone frequency or global accumulated cyclone energy (ACE) since more accurate data collection began in the 1970s. (See images below)
Figure 1: Diagram and data collection by Ryan N. Maue, “Global Tropical Cyclone Activity,” Climate Atlas, accessed October 10, 2024, https://climatlas.com/tropical/global_major_freq.png Figure 2: Last 50+ years of global and Northern Hemisphere cumulative cyclone energy: 24-month running totals. Note that the year shown represents the value of ACE over the last 24 months for the Northern Hemisphere (bottom row/gray boxes) and the entire world (top row/blue boxes). The area in between represents the entire ACE of the Southern Hemisphere. Source: Ryan N. Maue, “Global Tropical Cyclone Activity,” Climate Atlas, accessed October 10, 2024 https://climatlas.com/tropical/global_running_ace.png
Although the population in the coastal hurricane bullseye zone is much larger today than in the past, most of the ten deadliest hurricanes occurred in the recent past. Why? Due to improved early warning systems that have resulted in evacuations and infrastructure across the United States becoming hardened against severe weather due to stricter construction standards and technology. In addition, modern generators have prevented many deaths due to weather and have also ensured the speed at which emergency responders can get to communities and restore power. These improvements would not have been possible without fossil fuels and their byproducts, which climate alarmists want to eliminate.
Every deadly storm is a tragedy, and downplaying the danger and damage of tropical cyclones is as much a mistake as it is to exaggerate them and try to link them to climate change. In this case, CBS provided a simple, factual report on the grim history of major hurricane landfalls in the United States and its territories. Bravo, CBS. See if you can follow this up by recording the facts about severe weather in the future.
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