rock me like a hurricane

more datacrime and false association: the weather is always your fault and the only cure is world government

much is being made of our new friend beryl, an unusually strong early hurricane.

the predictable people are up in arms about the predictable things:

the weather is always your fault and if you don’t let us run the world economy right this second it’s extreme weather and forest fires for everyone world without end.

essentially none of this stands up to analysis. the fires are mostly the result of bad forestry policy. the costal damage from building on the coast.

the links between warming and hurricanes are fabricated. there is no real trend and the actual formation of hurricanes is A LOT more complicated than just “warm water.”

beryl is a weird artifact of the channeled energy of a tropical wave coming off africa that happened to get caught between two plumes of the sahara dust that so often makes air quality unpleasant on puerto rico this time of year. it also prevents hurricane formation because the sand laden air is too heavy to spin. then you need a steep lapse rate (rapid cooling with height as warm air rises that drives supersaturation), low wind shear, and a number of other factors.

this is a bit of a perfect storm in some ways, but it’s also an odd outlier.

we can argue about how hurricanes are formed and how to ascribe their provenance to various factors potentially manmade or otherwise, and the manifold groups purpose created to shill for this cause like the “world weather attribution network” who literally makes up fake causal claims for a living (see point 5) are sure to have much to say, as will the legions of pay for play reporters living off climate grants at the AP newswire, but if climate and warming were driving more hurricanes and the world were really warming so aggressively as the AGW folks claim, then one thing would be clearly visible:

there would be more and stronger hurricanes.

but there aren’t.

correlation does not prove causality, but a complete and total lack of correlation pretty much disproves it. it’s awfully hard to be a material/major cause of something and not correlate to its frequency.

and this looks like a job for:

we can draw this data back further, but the simple fact is it becomes a splice with unfair weighting toward the modern age and the data pre 1970’s (when the first weather satellites were launched) was piecemeal and incomplete. to try to compare modern satellite storm tracking to 1870 data seems inapt. but a 50 year signal is still quite enough to see if we have a noticeable trend.

spoiler alert: we don’t.

not in storm frequency (though if you squint, you can sort of see ENSO/el nino)

and not in, what to my mind, is the best overall metric, accumulated cyclone energy (ACE) the actual measure of the energy involved in the storm systems. (pre satellite, this was not really measurable in what would pass for modern terms)

in fact, back in 2022:

even the NOAA seems to be onside.

perhaps the top institution to study hurricanes winds up being (oddly) colorado state university. (apparently, those who study hurricanes know better than to live near them)

they have a handy data tool.

this is their annual plot for ACE. there’s just no real trend here. if anything, the last 15 years or so have tended toward the calm, not the stormy.

this is interesting because we actually saw an short fluctuation/upsurge in named storms peaking in 2018 and 2020. 2018 was a high ACE year, but 2020 was among the lowest in 45 years. (but it sure was an election year, wasn’t it? huh…)

but it was unremarkable for hurricanes, as is this trend:

(i like to use hurricane days better than number of storms as it better approximates ACE)

and even more so if we look at strong hurricanes (cat 3 or greater)

there is just not much here in terms of trend. hurricanes happen sometimes and sometimes they don’t. every year, people predict a bad hurricane season because it’s a perfect one sided bet. no one remembers if you’re wrong, but if you are right, you get to crow all year and next year too! (but predicting a mild one and getting a mild one means nothing but predicting a mild one and getting a strong one gets you mauled, so no one tries to play that side as it’s a bet you cannot win)

the media amplifies every storm and then goes silent every calm period. it’s one sided reporting seeking to alarm and to skew perception.

if this were related to CO2, it would show some meaningful uptrend. but there is none.

it’s media event and pretext for power grab. there’s no data here, just superstitious claptrap and predatory media making pretense at science.

clearly, it’s deeply en vogue to ascribe all the world’s ills to anthropogenic climate change these days and sitting presidents seem inclined to cast as “really dumb” any who would deign venture otherwise, but before accepting this canon too uncritically i really would urge you to consider the source…