What Does the Data Say About Climate Change and Hurricanes

     First, I would like to state that I am not a climate change denier, nor am I a climate crisis denier (a newer category of denial meant to ostracize). I would say that I am, however, a climate crisis skeptic. Climate change may well be a crisis, but I believe the current data is insufficient to determine whether it is a crisis or not. I also believe there are other more immediate problems to solve and devote funds toward that should be prioritized over climate funding. I believe climate change policy can cause harm in some circumstances by shifting priorities to less immediate future concerns away from more immediate present concerns. Finally, I believe that adaptation to extreme weather events, including those influenced by climate change, should be one of those immediate priorities. I heard an interview with UN chief António Guterres ahead of the UN conference. While he noted his past expertise and the UN’s power to coordinate humanitarian aid around the globe, he was also frustrated with the UN’s lack of power to tackle other issues like climate change. I think the UN should increase focus on humanitarian aid and prevention of unnecessary death, illnesses, and poverty rather than climate change. While it may seem that heat waves, fires, and storms influenced by climate change are the cause of many catastrophes, if one looks beyond the surface one will see that climate change is often one influence among many, and often a minor one compared to others. Therefore, it should not be an overriding focus of the U.N. as Guterres seems to make it with his frequent rhetoric. I think he should stick to what he is good at, humanitarian aid, and increase that focus.

     One can hardly miss the media’s obsessive focus on climate change as the main issue involving extreme weather, wildfires, sea level rise, habitat loss, and other issues. It sometimes appears as if the many other factors, often much larger than climate change, do not even exist. Sometimes this has been termed a form of climate reductionism where everything is reduced to climate as a cause. I think it is generally counterproductive in solving problems.

     Climate scientist Patrick Brown, The Breakthrough Institute’s Co-Director of the Climate and Energy Team and adjunct faculty member (lecturer) in the Energy Policy and Climate Program at Johns Hopkins University caused an uproar recently by publishing a paper in Nature, Climate warming increases extreme daily wildfire growth risk in California that focused only on climate change. After publication, he stated that he purposely left out other factors influencing California wildfires in order to show the ease of getting the paper published when it focuses solely on climate change. He was the lead author, but apparently, his co-authors were unaware of his ruse. While his stunt is perhaps not greatly effective, it does make a point. In his “confession,” he noted: “I knew not to try to quantify key aspects other than climate change in my research because it would dilute the story that prestigious journals like Nature and its rival, Science, want to tell.” “And the editors of these journals have made it abundantly clear, both by what they publish and what they reject, that they want climate papers that support certain preapproved narratives—even when those narratives come at the expense of broader knowledge for society.” He says this distorts the science. He notes that the influence of climate change on extreme wildfires is very real but his paper’s focus solely on climate change distorts the whole picture by neglecting other factors. He thinks that overfocusing on the emissions reduction approach to climate change takes away from technological solutions to adaptation to extreme weather. He also notes the common practice of focusing on the most impactful metrics: “Our paper, for instance, could have focused on a simple, intuitive metric like the number of additional acres that burned or the increase in intensity of wildfires because of climate change. Instead, we followed the common practice of looking at the change in risk of an extreme event—in our case, the increased risk of wildfires burning more than 10,000 acres in a single day.”

 

“This is a far less intuitive metric that is more difficult to translate into actionable information. So why is this more complicated and less useful kind of metric so common? Because it generally produces larger factors of increase than other calculations. To wit: you get bigger numbers that justify the importance of your work, its rightful place in Nature or Science, and widespread media coverage.” Through the rest of this confession, he goes through some other common “cherry-picking” practices of emphasis that accord with the desired narratives that he says are sought.  

 

     Now I will turn to Patrick Brown’s recent article published by the Breakthrough Institute that deals with climate change and hurricanes which does not show any pretense. He first notes that hurricanes have been an icon of climate change since the cover of Al Gore’s 2006 book, An Inconvenient Truth, depicted a hurricane arising from smokestacks.

     Firstly, he notes the characteristics of hurricanes that have been studied: frequency, strength, duration, size, rain rate, location, rate of intensification, and forward movement. Then, he notes how these characteristics are studied by the three main types of scientific evidence: historical trends, fundamental theory, and mathematical modeling. For this article, he considers historical trends in hurricane frequency and strength. The following four graphs show respectively global hurricane days, Category 3 and above global hurricane days, Atlantic Basin hurricane days, and Atlantic Basin Category 3 and above hurricane days.

 

 

One conclusion might be that among the six basins worldwide that host hurricanes, the only one that has shown an increase in hurricane days is the Atlantic Basin. However, much of that was likely a return to normal levels from less-than-normal hurricane days from the 1960s to the 1980s. The graph below shows the historical trends of hurricanes that have made landfall in the U.S.

 

 

The trendline shows no discernible increase in U.S. hurricane landfalls. The simple conclusion is that the media narratives of increased hurricane frequency and strength through time do not accord with the data. These conclusions are not new but are rarely pointed out or considered when discussing climate change in public forums. 

     But frequency and strength are not the whole story. He goes on to point out that: “there is strong support from all three kinds of scientific evidence listed above (observations, fundamental theory, and mathematical modeling) that warming is increasing the maximum rain rates in hurricanes by about 10 to 15 percent per degree Celsius.” Higher precipitation rates also lead to equivalent higher storm surges. Thus, the bottom line is that the evidence clearly shows that global warming is likely to lead to hurricanes with 10% more rain and 10% higher storm surges. These are not insignificant amounts, but they are not catastrophic either. The higher storm surges are also affected by sea level rise. While the sea level has been rising since the end of the last ice age and melting from its minor resurgences, a certain part of it is also due to global warming. That fraction is a matter of debate but is likely significant since Arctic ice melt in particular has been unprecedented in recent years.

     At the end of the article he leaves us with this observation: “.., I think the evidence indicates that the vast majority of the risk we face from hurricanes is due to living in a climate that naturally produces hurricanes—not due to a warming climate. When science communicators, the media, and politicians strain to view all extreme weather through the lens of climate change, it only serves to misinform the public and inadvertently undermines the credibility of the underlying science.”

 

 

 

References:

 

Are Hurricanes the Icons of Climate Change They are Made Out to Be? What the Research Really Says. Patrick Brown. The Breakthrough Institute. September 11, 2023. Are Hurricanes the Icons of Climate… | The Breakthrough Institute

 

'The Secretary has no power': UN Secretary General António Guterres plays the cards he's dealt. Chistianne Amanpour. CNN. September 18, 2023. 'The Secretary has no power': UN Secretary General António Guterres plays the cards he's dealt | CNN

 

Climate warming increases extreme daily wildfire growth risk in California. Patrick T. Brown, Holt Hanley, Ankur Mahesh, Colorado Reed, Scott J. Strenfel, Steven J. Davis, Adam K. Kochanski & Craig B. Clements. Nature (2023). August 30, 2023. Climate warming increases extreme daily wildfire growth risk in California | Nature

I Left Out the Full Truth to Get My Climate Change Paper Published. Patrick T. Brown. September 5, 2023. The Free Press.  I Left Out the Full Truth to Get My Climate Change Paper Published | The Free Press (thefp.com)