By Jeffrey Folks - August 25, 2022

Once again, as nearly every year, officials at NOAA and other agencies called for 2022 to be a "very active" hurricane season. In its May 24 release, NOAA predicted "an "above-average hurricane activity this year — which would make it the seventh consecutive above-average hurricane season." It's like the old joke that everyone's grandkid is "above average": for some reason, every hurricane season, the risk is now "above average."

I don't know how every year can be "above average," something that defies the laws of statistics. I suspect that it has to do with the strong bias of climate scientists rather than the strength of hurricanes. And in fact, hurricanes have been "fewer than average" this year and for many years recently. So far, halfway through the hurricane season, no Atlantic storms have made landfall on U.S. soil.

This lack of severe storms defies the dire predictions of global warming alarmists: that rising temperatures will cause catastrophic storms. In reality, one reason why there are fewer and less severe storms this year is that the Atlantic waters have been cooler than usual. That, combined with drier air over the Atlantic, caused by the atmospheric drift of Saharan dust, has caused potential tropical storms to dissipate.

Predictions of "very active" storm seasons are widely publicized each spring, but the reality of fewer and less severe storms never makes its way into the media. The truth is that some hurricane seasons are more active and some less so. The same is true of tornadoes, droughts, floods, and other natural phenomena. But only the extreme events get publicized and treated as confirmation of climate change. If the media were honest, they would report the truth that the weather has not changed a great deal, at least not since the end of the Little Ice Age in 1850 — and the warmer temperatures since then have been a blessing.

Global temperatures have risen one degree Celsius since the low point of 1850, so severe storms may be somewhat more common than in the distant past. But death rates have dropped precipitously. The worst hurricane in American history was the Great Galveston hurricane of September 8, 1900, which killed some 8,000 people. The worst tornado recorded in U.S. history was the Tri-State Tornado of March 18, 1925, which killed 751 people. Both of these storms occurred long before the period in which alarmists like Al Gore predicted that global warming would cause catastrophic storms — and clearly, they were not "man-made."

We are safer now because of technology . . .

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