Studies Show Hurricanes Not Increasing in Power Dissipation: Another Coup to Climate Change Hysteria

Those who believe that climate change will be the end of mankind tell us that all we need to do is drastically cut our carbon emissions to avert Armageddon. It would explain why the Biden administration was gung-ho with such climate policies as onerous power grid regulations, water heater energy efficiency standards, stricter emissions standards to encourage electric vehicle purchases, or the Inflation Reduction Act. Let's take a look at President Biden's response to Hurricane Helene as an example:

Nobody can deny the impact of climate crisis anymore. At least I hope they don't. They must be brain-dead if they do. Scientists report that with warming oceans powering more intense rains, storms like Helene are going to get stronger and stronger. 

Forgetting the irony of a man with clear cognitive decline commenting on brain function for a moment, I have to question the general premise of his claim that "climate change's impact on hurricanes is so obvious that someone with half a brain can realize it." I hate to break it to Biden and climate change activists everywhere, but it is decidedly not the case. 

In September 2024, the scientific journal Nature published a study showing a decreasing trend in the destructive potential of cyclones, which include typhoons and hurricanes (Tu et al., 2024). These Chinese meteorologists used a "power dissipation index" (PDI), which combines storm intensity, duration, and frequency, to determine whether hurricanes, cyclones, and typhoons have become more intense in the past four decades. Guess what they found? The overall global trend is that the PDI is on the decline, whereas it remains steady in the North Atlantic (see below; see Addendum for further detail). 

As much as I would like to say that I am surprised by these findings backed by meteorological data, I am not. Shortly after Hurricane Ian in 2022, I wrote a piece on how the media continued to exaggerate the effects of climate change on hurricanes. I had pointed out how weather-related deaths have been on the decline, the normalized cost of hurricanes (which adjusts for population and property construction increases) remained relatively constant, and that the number of overall hurricanes and major hurricanes has not increased. 

I can point to a study from the Heritage Foundation that was released in December (D'Aleo and Dayaratna, 2024) about how the lack of trends in hurricane activity since the mid-1800s (see chart above). I suspect that Biden would not read a Heritage Foundation report, much less heed it, because the Heritage Foundation is on the Right. Instead, maybe President Biden should listen to his National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which found the following: 

• "There is no strong evidence of century-scale increasing trends in U.S. landfalling hurricanes or major hurricanes. Similarly for Atlantic basin-wide hurricanes, there is not strong evidence for an increase since the late 1800s in hurricanes, major hurricanes, or the proportion of hurricanes that reach major hurricane intensity." 
• "After adjusting for a likely under-count of hurricanes in the pre-satellite era, there is essentially no long-term trend in hurricane counts. The evidence for an upward trend is even weaker if we look at U.S. landfalling hurricanes, which even show a slight negative trend beginning from 1900 or from the late 1800s." 
• While the NOAA projects that the lifetime maximum intensity of Atlantic Hurricanes will increase by about 5% during the 21st century, NOAA also projects "substantial decrease (~25%) in the overall number of Atlantic and tropical storms." 
• "After adjusting for such an estimated number of missing storms, there remains just a small nominally positive trend (not statistically significant) in tropical storm occurrence from 1878-2006." 
• "We conclude that historical Atlantic hurricane data at this stage do not provide compelling evidence for a substantial greenhouse warming-induced century-scale increase in: frequency of tropical storms, hurricanes, or major hurricanes, or in the proportion of hurricanes that become major hurricanes." 

Aside from the ubiquitous nature of climate change, what draws people's attention is the notion of "if it bleeds, it leads." That is why climate change activists and their allies have to resort to using low-probability models with tenuous assumptions to make their case. The fact that actual meteorological data show that hurricanes in the Atlantic or cyclones and typhoons in other regions of the world are not getting worse, at least indicated by the PDI, in spite of increased carbon emissions undermines the climate change hysteria. It is why I remain skeptical of climate change fear-mongering. We should focus on policy alternatives to mitigate the effects of hurricanes, which can include constructing hurricane-resilient buildings, privatizing flood insurance, and eliminating price gouging laws. Giving into climate change hysteria like the former President has done will do nothing to help us weather future hurricanes.

1-30-2025 Addendum: I had a spouse of a longtime friend reach out and comment on this blog entry since he is an electrical engineer by trade and has a passion for climate change. He correctly pointed out that the Nature study points out there has been a slight increase in intensity (See Figure below, Part B) and that this increase was caused by various atmospheric phenomena. I concede this point where I changed the title of this blog entry and made some other tweaks to acknowledge the fact that intensity has indeed been increasing. 

I will also point out that the overall PDI is on the decline due to decrease in frequency and duration (See Figure above, Parts A and C). The authors point out that the PDI has been more commonly used in the literature instead of focusing on a singular factor, such as intensity or frequency. There could be a methodological flaw in how each factor in the PDI is weighted or whether there are other considerations that should be factored into PDI. I am sure that debate could be had by experts who know more about this than I do because my profession in the field of public policy and I cannot possibly know everything about every topic. 

At the same time, it begs an important question for me. If PDI is indeed being more frequently used as a metric for tropical storm severity in the field of climate change, why is PDI not increasing if climate change is supposed to engender apocalyptic change? At the very least, it has me think that the magnitude of climate change is not as obvious as President Biden makes it out to be. Maybe I will get a lengthy response from my friend's spouse addressing some of these concerns, which is why I would not be surprised if this topic ends up being a future blog entry.