The Data Is Clear: Hurricanes Are Not Getting More Dangerous

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Andrew Montford has that data, and it shows that Helene wasn't uniquely dangerous.

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.

We can go back even further, of course, to the Galveston hurricane of 1900, which is the deadliest natural disaster in American history, with 145 mph winds, resulting in between 6,000 and 12,000 fatalities. That storm affected the Dominican Republic, Cuba, the Turks and Caicos Islands, the Bahamas, the United States Gulf Coast, the central Midwest, the mid-Atlantic states, New England, and eastern Canada. That storm cut a swath of damage across North America at a time when nobody had even thought about anthropogenic climate change.

Forecasters didn't even get 2024 completely right:

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.

In other words: The Earth's climate, the global climate, remains as it has been, an inconceivably vast and chaotic system with trillions of inputs and outputs. One of the reasons that the Atlantic hurricane season was milder than expected? Unexpected rainfalls in the Sahara Desert, half a world away from the path of Hurricane Helene. There is no set of projections or computer models that can accurately predict these systems; it's difficult for weather forecasters to get local weather right more than a few days out, so it should be no surprise that models attempting to predict global trends often get things wrong when they don't even know all the possible inputs.

 

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