New evidence shows global hurricane frequency and intensity have declined for 30 consecutive years – by how many watts?

From the Daily Skeptic

Chris Morrison

Last month, a small but powerful cyclone named Chito made landfall on the island of Mayotte and then swept through Mozambique, causing considerable damage and killing about 100 people. Days after the tragedy, a Green Blob-funded Introduction to Carbon Noting that scientists have “long believed” that climate change is making cyclones more severe in the region, Blob-funded Imperial College London's World Weather Attribution (WWA) has made a near-instant and curiously accurate Estimates suggest that the likelihood of a Chido-like cyclone coming in 2024 is 40% higher than in pre-industrial times. Not to be outdone, Green Blob-funded cheerleaders guardian Added the mandatory “Cyclones are becoming more severe due to the climate emergency”. Almost no one noticed that amid all the doom and gloom about net zero, there was a scientific paper published in December nature The study found that the destructive power of cyclones (a common term for typhoons and hurricanes) in any ocean basin has not increased over the past 30 years. In the South Indian Basin, home to Cyclone Chitto, the frequency and duration of Cyclone Chitto have decreased dramatically in recent times.

Today, when fervent net-zero activism takes hold, reality gets little attention, but this paper, written by a group of Chinese meteorologists, makes its case by considering facts and figures. The scientists used the Power Dissipation Index (PDI), which they believe is better than a single measurement because it combines storm intensity, duration and frequency. The graph below shows the cumulative index of tropical cyclones across all ocean basins, along with global indicators.

The cumulative PDI in some Pacific regions shows a decreasing trend, while the trend in the North Atlantic remains stable. The downward trend is particularly pronounced in the southern Indian Ocean, and the overall global line is moving in a similar direction.

So why is all this scientific nonsense being written by green activists in the mainstream media? Much of this stems from new pseudoscience that claims to link individual weather events to human-caused climate change. Press releases peddling climate apocalypse were issued days after natural disasters and were eagerly reproduced by activist journalists promoting the “net zero” fantasy. The distinguished science writer Roger Pielke Jr. was a strong critic of this new pseudoscience, which he called the alchemy of weather attribution. In a recent post on Substack following the Chido incident, he noted that Imperial College's WWA simply assumed the conclusion it was trying to prove by accepting that every storm would get stronger due to ocean warming. this conclusion. Using this explanation, Pilke continued, it is straightforward to conclude that climate change makes storms more likely. Or as Empire puts it: “The difference in storm intensity and likelihood of storm intensity between the counterfactual climate and today’s climate can be attributed to climate change.”

As new Chinese newspapers show, things are not that simple. Pilk noted that tropical storms experience many environmental effects, such as vertical wind shear and storm-induced ocean surface cooling, even when they sit over warm waters. He believes: “This complexity means that simple storyline attributions – that ocean warming will predictably mean stronger storms – are inappropriate when used to describe the behavior of individual storms.” Pielke also criticized it harshly. provided statistical evidence to support WWA's claims. Even if storms like Cheetos were more likely to occur in the future, it would take a long time to detect significant changes using the 90% confidence threshold set by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). By a long time, he means thousands of years.

“Perhaps this is why hypotheses are favored over evidence,” Pielke said.

The BBC's now routine end-of-year weather forecast presents many of the assumptions, with the headline: “Extreme weather poses challenges for billions of people.” The report is by Esme Stallard ) wrote, claiming that record-breaking heat brought extreme weather, including hurricanes and a month-long drought. Dr Friederike Otto, director of WWA and senior lecturer in climate science at Imperial College London, said: “We are living in a dangerous new era – extreme weather is causing unrelenting suffering. “Fossil fuel warming The impact of COVID-19 has never been more pronounced or more devastating than in 2024,” she added.

The redoubtable Paul Homewood was unimpressed by Stallard's opening remarks about the increasing number of extreme weather events and lodged a complaint with the BBC. Stallard went on to list some random events “without providing any evidence that they were not natural occurrences that happen all the time,” Homewood said. “There is also no evidence that such events have become more frequent or extreme over time,” he added.

The BBC report highlights Typhoon and Hurricane Beryl in the Philippines, noting that the intensity of such events is likely to increase due to climate change. Homewood noted that official data shows no evidence that they are getting stronger over time. Recent droughts in the Amazon have attracted much attention, but Homewood points to the World Bank's climate portal showing rainfall in the region has increased by 5% over the past 30 years. Holmwood observed that throughout the report, the BBC based its claims on weather attribution computer models. “However, computer models are not evidence and can be manipulated to deliver any desired outcome. This is why they are widely derided by the wider scientific community,” he said.

For Roger Pierke, the attribution of extreme weather is “puzzling”. The most charitable explanation for their proliferation is that there is a demand for them, including from many in the media. This need will be met by someone, he concluded. “A less charitable explanation is that there is a systematic effort underway to question and undermine actual climate science, including the IPCC’s assessments, in order to present a completely false picture of reality to support climate propaganda. We Call it pseudoscientific gaslighting,” he suggested.

Chris Morrison is daily skepticof Environment editor.

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