hurricanes

Hard data, collected over decades, show no increase in the frequency or severity of hurricanes over the past century.

For more than 20 years I’ve watched media outlets fail to accurately portray the debate surrounding climate change. Unfortunately, things are getting worse.

New research published in Nature Sustainability shows, normalizing for economic losses from hurricanes making landfall over time, there has been no trend in either increased or decreased economic losses from hurricanes from 1900 to 2017.

Conjectural future tolls from climate change pale compared to real energy poverty deaths now.

The No Tricks Zone has summarized several recent scientific reports examining extreme weather in different regions around the world. All have come to essentially the same conclusion: Current weather conditions are not extreme when compared to the past, and weather is more extreme during colder than warmer periods of time.

The 2017 Atlantic hurricane season got an early start with Arlene in April, but the most powerful storms didn’t start to hit until the last week of August, when Hurricane Harvey flooded Texas and Louisiana.

The twelve year U.S. major hurricane drought came to an end with landfalls by two Category 4 storms within three weeks. 

The southern United States has just experienced two of the most severe storms of the century: Hurricanes Harvey and Irma. The economic damage wrought by these disasters may approach $150 billion.

Hurricane Harvey struck Texas last weekend with winds of 130 mph and then stalled, dumping feet of rain and causing catastrophic flooding. 

Hurricane Harvey is approaching the Texas coast and is forecast to end an almost twelve-year span since a major hurricane (categories 3, 4, and 5 on the Saffir-Simpson hurricane intensity scale) made landfall in the United States. 

Pioneering hurricane researcher William Gray, Ph.D., died on April 16, 2016 at the age of 86. Gray was a good friend of The Heartland Institute, speaking at five of our International Conferences on Climate Change and attending most others.

Bill went where the data led him, especially when it came to the frequency of hurricane activity due to man-caused, CO2-driven global warming. Point of fact: Bill said Al Gore’s filmed prediction of AGW causing more hurricanes was nonsense. Bill, not Al, was proven right.

The entirety of the United States is now a federal disaster area – rendered thus by Washington, D.C. Unlike areas hit by hurricanes, tornadoes and other acts of God – our cataclysm is entirely man-made. Decades of anti-Reality policies have left our nation an uber-addled mess.