Is Climate Change Making Hurricanes Worse?

Climate alarmists like President Joe Biden assure us that all we need do to avert the destruction of hurricanes—or at least to lessen it—is to sacrifice offerings to the climate gods by giving up our gas-guzzling internal combustion engines and paying indulgences to Al Gore or something.

You see, humans as a species have sinned, and we must sacrifice our prosperity to prevent the end of the world. Unfortunately for the alarmists, the world stubbornly refuses to end, and even the supposed evidence they trot out as proof of impending doom doesn’t exactly mean what they think it means.

Take hurricanes, for example.

In October, Biden insisted that “nobody can deny the impact of the climate crisis anymore because of Hurricane Helene.”

“Scientists report that with warming oceans powering more intense rains, storms like Helene are getting stronger and stronger,” he said. “Today, in North Carolina, I saw the impacts of that fury: massive trees uprooted; homes literally swept off their foundations, swept down rivers; you know, families that are heartbroken.”

Yet is Hurricane Helene really proof that man-made climate change is making life more dangerous in the U.S.?

The Heritage Foundation special report “Keeping an Eye on the Storms: An Analysis of Trends in Hurricanes Over Time” answers definitively in the negative.

In the report, Joe D’Aleo, visiting fellow in Heritage’s Center for Energy, Climate, and Environment, and Kevin Dayaratna, chief statistician in Heritage’s Center for Data Analysis, break down the data.

Hurricane Trends

Hurricanes have long plagued the continental United States, tracing back as far as the Great Colonial Hurricane of 1635, which hit the Jamestown Settlement and the Massachusetts Bay Colony only 15 years after the founding of Plymouth Plantation. From 1900 to 1960, no fewer than 112 hurricanes hit the continental U.S., long before the burning of fossil fuels on a mass scale.

The deadliest natural disaster in U.S. history did not take place after the burning of fossil fuels, but before. The Galveston Hurricane killed between 8,000 and 12,000 people—in 1900.

D’Aleo and Dayaratna note that U.S. average high temperatures have increased since the 1950s, and that the burning of fossil fuels has increased since the 1950s on a global scale.

Heritage Foundation chart showing U.S. temperatures.

Heritage Foundation chart showing the burning of fossil fuels.

Yet these increases in temperature and emissions do not correlate with either more hurricanes or more intense hurricanes.

Heritage Foundation charts of hurricane trends since the 1850s.

This data likely undercounts the number of hurricanes before 1970, because the introduction of satellite monitoring enabled more accurate data.

What Actually Explains Hurricane Trends?

If the burning of fossil fuels and the increase in global temperature do not account for hurricane trends, what does?

D’Aleo and Dayaratna identify three better explanations.

The El Niño-Southern Oscillation cycle describes how alternating periods of warming and cooling in the central and eastern parts of the Pacific Ocean near the Equator affect the climate in South America, the Southwestern U.S., Australia, and Southeast Asia. El Niño, the warm phase, leads to wetter conditions in the U.S. and South America, along with drier conditions in Australia and Southeast Asia. La Niña, the colder phase, leads to wetter conditions in Australia and Asia, along with drier conditions in the Americas.

Scientists have long found correlations between U.S. hurricanes and these cycles. A 1984 study found that of the 54 major hurricanes striking the U.S. between 1900 and 1983, only four hit landfall in the 16 El Niño years, while 50 struck in the 68 non-16 El Niño years. Later research found that hurricanes have a 71% greater chance of reaching the U.S. East coast in La Niña years than El Niño years.

The Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation describes decade-long periods of warm and cool sea surface temperature in the Atlantic Ocean. The warm phase often brings increased hurricane activity.

The authors plotted the oscillation alongside the Accumulated Cyclone Index (a measure of hurricane intensity) and found a much greater correlation than global temperature or carbon emissions. The authors also cite four studies backing up this correlation.

The Pacific Decadal Oscillation is a similar pattern of decade-long periods of alternating warm and cool sea surface temperature in the northern Pacific Ocean. Cool temperatures in the central North Pacific tend to correlate with an El Niño phase, and with more hurricanes in the Western Pacific and fewer hitting the U.S. East Coast.

The Pacific Oscillation correlates with the Accumulated Cyclone Energy for hurricanes in the northwest Pacific Ocean.

Are Hurricanes More Destructive?

Although hurricanes may not have worsened with climate change, alarmists often claim that tropical cyclones are more destructive now than previously.

Twenty of the 30 most destructive hurricanes since 1900 have hit the mainland U.S. after 2020, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association. Besides Hurricane Katrina, which carried out a devastating $200 billion in damage in 2005, all of the top four made landfall in the last decade.

Yet this data does not reflect the worsening of hurricanes so much as the population growth and economic growth of the U.S. in coastal areas, D’Aleo and Dayaratna conclude.

For instance, only 1.3 million residents called Miami-Dade County, Florida, home in 1971, living in 473,200 housing units. By 2022, the population had grown to more than 2.6 million, and the housing units had more than doubled, to 1.1 million, according to the Census Bureau.

In 2018, a paper in the journal “Nature Sustainability” put the hurricane damage from previous years into better context by adjusting for increases in wealth, population, and inflation. This graph shows no meaningful trend in hurricane losses, although a general increase in recent years reflects the growing population in America’s coastal regions.

Hurricanes do pose a serious risk to lives and property today, as they have for centuries. Americans can address this threat by building more hurricane-resistant housing. Government can help by loosening regulations and unleashing more economic growth to enable Americans to solve their own problems and help communities when disaster strikes.

Cracking down on fossil fuels will only slow the progress toward responding to these threats.

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