Andrew Montford has that data, and it shows that Helene wasn't uniquely dangerous.
Forecasters didn't even get 2024 completely right:
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.
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:
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.
