A recent post at the website Rigzone, “No Hurricanes Strike USA For 1st Time in a Decade,” discusses how the United States lucked out by not being struck by any hurricanes this year, and never once credits climate change. The whole post is factual and straightforward. Climate change is not making hurricanes worse, it is simply not evidenced in the data.
Rigzone reported that “for the first time in a decade, not a single hurricane struck the U.S. this season, and that was a much needed break,” as the lead-in to discussing the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) recent statements on the end of Atlantic hurricane season.
NOAA and Rigzone both acknowledged the tragic landfalls in Jamaica and other nearby countries, but does not try to attribute them to climate change. Rather, they simply factually reported on the storms and their tragic consequences. This is great reporting, straightforward and without spin. Earlier in the season, Climate Realism addressed some of the false claims regarding Hurricane Melissa and Erin, particularly when media claimed that “rapid intensification” was due to climate change. That was false, no real world data backed the assertion, only misleading and corrupt attribution models that over-emphasize water temperature and downplay other factors that influence hurricane strength and formation.
Rigzone noted in passing how the season fell within the lower end of NOAA’s predicted ranges for the number of named storms and hurricanes, but over-estimated with regards to the Atlantic season overall. Initially, NOAA predicted “a 30 percent chance of a near-normal season, a 60 percent chance of an above-normal season, and a 10 percent chance of a below-normal season.” Those numbers were later adjusted towards a 50-50 split.
This season was near-normal, showing that the atmosphere is complex with a lot of factors, some poorly understood, that influence the severity of a hurricane season, beyond temperatures. Nobody can perfectly predict what other factors might spring up and change the seasonal trend.
It might be wise for NOAA and other agencies to err on the high side when making seasonal forecasts, just to prevent people from underestimating the danger from tropical cyclones. However, it does undermine some credibility when it seems every season is supposed to be terrible and most aren’t. Climate alarmists often take advantage of these proclamations to suggest that hurricane seasons are intensifying when clearly they are not.
This science based reporting is refreshing, though suspicious, because one wonders if the news was bad, if the season was worse than usual, whether they would then attribute it to climate change. One wonders why the first no-landfall year in a decade (a good thing) isn’t caused by climate change, while bad weather is, at least according to much of the media.
In any case, this reporting by Rigzone was very good, and they deserve props for it, because it is all too easy to toss in a “throwaway” line about climate change, but they resisted and kept the post fact-focused. Good job, Rigzone, for some accurate, straight, reporting, sans any climate change hype.
