Media Continues to Exaggerate Threat of Climate Change: Hurricanes Are No Exception

At the end of last month, Hurricane Ian unleashed its Category 4 fury on multiple locations, including Cuba and Florida. This hurricane is likely to be the costliest since Hurricane Andrew in 1992. While people are recovering from the havoc, media outlets have decided that this disaster is a carte blanche to hype up the effects of climate change as it pertains to hurricanes: 

• Study finds that climate change added 10 percent to Ian's rainfall (AP News)
• Is Climate Change Making Hurricanes Worse? (Economist)
• How Climate Change Is Rapidly Fueling Super Hurricanes (Washington Post)

These are but a few examples of the media using clickbait to try to increase views during a natural disaster. Here is the question I would like to ask: are hurricanes actually more intense and frequent or are we hearing more about hurricanes and other natural disasters because the media decides to report on it more frequently and more intensely than it used to? 

Last November, I pointed out how using low-probability, worst-case assumptions from scary climate change modeling to drive environmental policy is ill-advised. A peer-reviewed study from Europe shows that economic losses and weather-related deaths have declined considerably since 1980 (Formetta and Feyen, 2019). If you notice the graph below from the aforementioned study, the declining trend also exists in costal flooding. 

A study from a University of Colorado professor also shows that the cost of natural disasters as a percent of global GDP has decreased from 0.3 percent of GDP to 0.25 percent between 1990 and 2017 (Pielke, 2018).

So what about hurricanes specifically? Are hurricanes killing more people? Do we see more havoc wreaked on the economy? The question about whether it harms the economy is more complicated because more people have been owning property in hurricane-prone areas. That is why using normalized cost trends is a way to make comparing hurricanes over time analogous, i.e., it becomes more of an apples-to-apples comparison. Essentially, the normalization process estimates costs from a historical storm if the same natural event were to take place in modern times. Using this normalization process, we can see that there has been no discernible trend in economic cost between 1900 and 2017 (Weinkle et al., 2018).

But at least there have been more hurricanes, right? Not so much. A report from the American Meteorological Society shows that the number of overall hurricanes and major hurricanes (i.e., Category 3-5) have been on the decline (Klotzbach et al., 2018). The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) found that "there is still no consensus on the relative magnitude of human and natural influences on past changes in Atlantic hurricane history (IPCC, p. 1588)." 

Even better, we can consult the researchers over at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which is the government entity responsible for such tasks as oceanic and atmospheric research. NOAA summarizes its findings in Global Warming and Hurricanes. Here were some of my favorite parts from the NOAA:

•  "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." 

In other words, reputable studies and government findings conclude that anthropogenic climate change has not caused more frequent hurricanes, more intense hurricanes, or greater economic damage. Furthermore, the NOAA shows that the lower of frequency of projected hurricanes will offset the slightly higher intensity of projected hurricanes. Not only have hurricanes not gotten overall worse over time, but we have become more resilient because we have done a better job at weathering hurricanes, as well as natural disasters more generally. Instead of unleashing a storm of misinformation to make a quick buck, perhaps more media outlets should try reporting facts, even if they end up painting a less catastrophic picture than a climate change Armageddon.