re: New Category 6 Hurricane Classification Proposed Due to Climate Change

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A Wall Street Journal columnist wrote that when it comes to hurricanes, too much is made of the climate change effect.

"Atlantic hurricanes are not becoming more frequent," columnist Bjorn Lomborg wrote Sept. 3. "In fact, the frequency of hurricanes making landfall in the continental U.S. has declined slightly since 1900."

Lomborg continued.

"There aren’t more powerful hurricanes either. The frequency of Category 3 and above hurricanes making landfall since 1900 is also trending slightly down," he wrote.

Lomborg is a Danish political scientist and president of Copenhagen Consensus Center, a Danish think tank. He has long questioned conventional wisdom on climate change, and his column said improving infrastructure would do more to save lives and property than cutting carbon emissions.

The idea that the U.S. is seeing fewer hurricanes, and fewer powerful ones as well, runs counter to the thrust of many news articles. It's fair to say that hurricanes sit in one of the knottier corners of climate change where the trends and underlying forces are tough to untangle. But Lomborg overstates the data.

Downward trend vs. no trend in frequency

Lomborg cites a 2018 article in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society that had a chart showing a slight decline in the yearly number of hurricanes that hit the U.S.




Chart of hurricanes making landfall in the U.S. since 1900 (© American Meteorological Society. Used with permission.)

Hurricane activity swings up and down, and the authors use a statistical device to create an overall trend line — the dotted line in the chart.

"I simply show the data of what actually has happened, as documented in the best, peer-reviewed papers, to contrast what many believe from listening to a media filled with hurricane reporting," Lomborg told us.

Lomborg’s data, though, is more ambiguous than first appears. The study’s authors note that their dotted line is not statistically significant.

One of the authors, Roger Pielke Jr., a political scientist in the University of Colorado’s environmental studies program, affirmed Lomborg’s claim about a slight decline. But he also said the latest U.N. report found "no trend in the frequency of U.S. landfall events."

A finding of "no trend" is not the same as finding a downward trend.

The decrease was not meaningful, said Christopher Landsea, National Hurricane Center’s chief of Tropical Analysis and Forecast Branch. Researchers in this field emphasize that looking back to 1900, there is no discernable trend, up or down.

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