Hey Roger, ol' chum! Great to hear from you! Bringing the heat, as always, my friend! I can't believe I still block you, let me undo that immediately! Then we can hang out on twitter and reminisce about the great times we had, like the time you accused me without evidence of plagiarizing an oped! Man, that was hilarious! Now where's that unblock button ...
At this point in history, it's offensive that you're still out here making these arguments. We're talking about human lives and livelihoods, and vastly disproportionately poor and powerless ones. Your work in supporting the denial-industrial complex makes Andy's blaringly-obvious, unimaginative articles the only acceptable discourse on climate change -- because you create the imperative for debunkers like Andy to write these dry-as-dirt articles rather than opening space for poets, dreamers, and metaphoriticians like myself to gain any traction. Your efforts, and the efforts of people like you, are keeping the discourse around this issue stalled out in the 1990s, while the problem rapidly accelerates around us. At a minimum you owe us an honest disclosure: who is funding you, right now? Who is funding the army of anonymous trolls even here on substack that is arguing that climate change "isn't that bad" and "isn't a crisis"? We all know who stands to gain from all that labor.
By what right do you claim an authority to control who can engage in public debate? You claim no expertise, but nevertheless reject Roger's positions with ridiculous ad hominem attacks.
But it's much more disgraceful that you claim to be advocating for the poor and powerless by trying to keep them from getting access to the energy sources that can raise them out of poverty. Prosperity can help them improve nutrition, get access to good medical care, educate their children, and protect themselves from natural disasters. Denying them access to affordable energy doesn't look like protecting them.
OK but what is the policy bottom line? Principally that we need to use forward-looking modes of risk to build hazard-mitigating infrastructure and create incentives for building in areas that are less vulnerable to storm (or river flooding or wildfire) damage. Exactly how much ACC increases the potential for harm is neither hear nor there for harm reduction.
I do not see how resiliency "gets to" fossil fuels. Perhaps you mean that there are some uses of fossil fuels that can only be replaced extremely high cost. I agree with that and think that a least cost suite of net CO2 reducing technologies will include some carbon capture and sequestration.
I am sympathetic to the sense that the future can be better than the past notwithstanding the increase in CO2 concentrations. But it seems to me that one avenue of that better future is taking cost effective steps to reduce the increase net CO2 emissions. Perhaps your take is that cost effective mitigation of could be so effective that we need not reduce net emissions at all; investments in doing so necessarily have NPV<0 because there is no net benefit. That is quite a claim. Or am I still misunderstanding you?
Rob Bradley says "Stock, dense, reliable energies do that--dilute, intermittent energy flows do not."
Realize who this Bradley is that you are discussing the topic. He was speechwriter for Ken Lay of Enron. Not sure who he is working for now, but doesn't matter since fossil fuels are finite & non-renewable and we have to transition independent of climate change concerns. File it under the No Regrets strategy that people like Bradley are deathly afraid of becoming the next motto for the energy transition.
I said what I do or might agree with and invited him to clarify his position. I really do not care an interlocutor works for or did work for. I'll try to take his arguments seriously.
This is not an either/or issue, as you note (either climate change or societal change driving tropical cyclone *impacts*). But your argument appears to rely on the same tactic you disparage in others: "the selective emphasis of certain facts that bolster their stance."
You omit the abundant and vital array of studies of "paleotempestology" records showing that strong hurricanes can be frequent in periods when sea temperate were cooler: See Jeff Donnelly's work over the last two decades, a 2007 study I wrote up in The New York Times: "Over the last 5,000 years, the eastern Caribbean has experienced several periods, lasting centuries, in which strong hurricanes occurred frequently even though ocean temperatures were cooler than those measured today, according to a new study." https://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/24/science/earth/24storm.html
You're also way out of date. Relying on Kerry Emanuel's near-decade-old rebuttal to Roger's 538 post misses Roger's subsequent output (see links in his reply to this post) and misses Kerry's important recent work with PhD advisee Rapahel Rousseau-Rizzi nailing down that shifts in *aerosol* pollution have been the dominant shaper of recent North Atlantic hurricane patterns (not CO2-driven warming): Natural and anthropogenic contributions to the hurricane drought of the 1970s–1980s: https://texmex.mit.edu/pub/emanuel/PAPERS/Rousseau-Rizzi_Emanuel_2022_published.pdf
As far as I can see, none of that actually contradicts what Andy has written in this post. All else being equal, warmer sea surface temperatures will tend to increase the intensity of a TC. However, there are other factors that could change the frequency of TCs, so that warming may lead to fewer TCs overall.
His post is about hurricane *destructiveness* and loss, with intensity just one of the factors that can increase loss. Most of the others are societal sources of vulnerability, as countless disaster researchers have found. Think back to Hurricane Dorian's damage in the Bahamas. Most of the islands recovered rapidly. The Haitian migrant workers who lived in the informal settlement called The Mudd were devastated. Same hurricane, different impacts. This Guardian report by David Smith really nailed the reality: 'The poor are punished': Dorian lays bare inequality in the Bahamas https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/sep/13/hurricane-dorian-the-mudd-haitians-inequality
Again, none of that really changes that - all else being equal - TCs are (probably) becoming more destructive for the reasons Andy highlights in his post. Of course, the actual impact of a TC will be influenced by the resilience (or vulnerability) of the community that is impacted. The reslience of communities is not going to change by magic, and ignoring that TCs are likely to become more destructive as the planet warms is unlikely to help motivate investment in improving resilience.
With on this. What is important, to my eye, in the wider climate activism world is to reconsider the longstanding practice (goes back to An Inconvenient Truth) of making the climate > hurricanes story all about emissions reduction (discounting what you and I just stressed, which is the need to reduce risk by all means necessary).
Most TC activity originates from the tropical/equatorial band, where the AGW trend is absolutely swamped by surface temperature influenced by ENSO and other oceanic climate dipoles. Attribution at this point is moot. Consider I have better attribution of ENSO cycles arising from long-period tidal factors (Mf, Mm, Ss, Ssa, etc) than TC activity due to AGW. And that's because the fingerprint of ENSO can be mapped exactly to tidal cycles, whereas AGW is essentially a single degree-of-freedom -- a weak secular trend buried in the ocean's upwelling cycles.
At this moment in history, why do you think it's important to parse out the societal and geophysical factors of hurricane destructiveness? The fact is, both are getting worse simultaneously, and both are driven by human politics. Both can only be fixed with massive socialist government spending, which doesn't look likely.
I think it's important for people like you, whose voices have been so dominant in the climate/environmentalist movement, to interrogate whether you are facilitating political change or if you're acting as a buffer for the capitalist class. https://thespouter.substack.com/p/the-dialectics-of-liberal-environmentalism
I strongly sense - based on decades of reporting - that emissions-focused arguments for action are dangerously obscuring the need for aggressive changes on the ground to cut risk where vulnerability is greatest. Sift for the #expandingbullseye hashtag. Same issues in hurricane, fire, flood zones both rich and poor. Here's a snippet from Florida: https://revkin.substack.com/p/grappling-with-catastrophe-after-22-09-28 Here from Clorado wildfire country: https://revkin.substack.com/p/building-forward-safer-where-communities-22-01-05 And emissions cuts are needed forever, as I've been wirting since 1988.
"It is likely that the global proportion of Category 3–5 tropical cyclone instances … have increased globally over the past 40 years." (Section 11.7.1.2)
Andrew, I know you do this as a hobby, and I appreciate that you cite the IPCC, but you are cherry picking. Why limit yourself to the past 40 years? We know that there is lot of decadal variability (and even annual auto-correlation) when it comes to hurricanes, and therefore the longer the observation period the better. Why not cite the first paragraph of the very same section?
"There is low confidence in most reported long-term (multi-decadal to centennial) trends in TC frequency- or intensity-based metrics"
Based on these long term trends I'd argue it is incorrect to say "with some certainty that TCs are on average more intense than those that form in a cooler climate."
1. Tropical cyclones are becoming more destructive: sea level. This seems to be a strong case. It argues for stronger protections against floods and storm surges.
2. Tropical cyclones are becoming more destructive: rainfall. This seems like a good intuitive case. You cite the IPCC's conclusion that climate change is responsible for extreme rainfall in Hurricane Harvey. I'm curious if there's been any systematic measurement of rainfall from tropical cyclones over time. I can't find any reference to such studies. I know there are models predicting that anthropogenic causes will increase rainfall, decrease translation speeds, etc. It would be nice if there were any historical data to identify things like: What's a normal range for rainfall from a hurricane? Has there been a trend in rainfall from hurricanes? Does any of this change over the multi-decadal cycles observed in hurricane activity? Aside from modeling, is there any evidence of anthropogenic causes to any of this?
3. Tropical cyclones are becoming more destructive: intensity. This claim seems much less established. The abstract of the article you link for "basic physics" doesn't claim that overall warming temperatures make hurricanes more intense - it actually states "the factors that control the intensity of hurricanes are still poorly understood, leading to almost no reliability in forecasts of hurricane intensity evolution." Your quotes from the IPCC are hardly compelling. "It is likely that the global proportion of Category 3–5 tropical cyclone instances … have increased globally over the past 40 years." But the same section of the IPCC report notes that "A subset of the best-track data corresponding to hurricanes that have directly impacted the USA since 1900 is considered to be reliable, and shows no trend in the frequency of USA landfall events". NOAA data also shows no trend in the number or proportion of Category 3-5 hurricanes in the same period. It is clear that Atlantic hurricane activity has increased over the last 40-50 years, but this is because the 1970s were the decade of lowest recorded activity ever. The increase since then is clearly, at least in part, a return to "normal" levels of activity. Your conclusion "You can say with some certainty that TCs are on average more intense than those that form in a cooler climate." is utterly unsupported by any of the sources you mention, or any other published data I've seen.
4. What we’re not sure about: number of tropical cyclones. Well, I'm not sure, either, aside from what I mentioned above. Enough said on that.
5. What we’re not sure about: monetary damage from tropical cyclones. You claim that Professor Kerry explains why it's wrong to claim no trend in "normalized" damage from tropical storms. I won't wade into this debate because it covers only 23 years' worth of data. But, as noted in 3. above, there's no trend over the last 120 years in the number of storms making US landfall, or in their intensity. There may be some increase from storm surge damage due to rising sea level, but it seems pretty clear that any other trend has to be due to simply having more property, and more valuable property, in storm-affected areas. You cite the wisdom of insurance companies in raising rates and withdrawing from Florida, but the insurance companies claim the rates are rising because of increasing fraud, aided by a 2017 Florida Supreme Court decision that made fraudulent claims harder and more expensive for insurance companies to fight. https://www.insurance.com/home-and-renters-insurance/home-insurers-leaving-florida
Point 1 seems to be strong. The others seem to range from speculative to unsupportable. If you have stronger evidence, I'd like to see it.
This is a high quality comment. Brian calmly evaluates the author's arguments, cites quality references, and avoids falling into the trap of binary thinking. He agrees with the author on the first point, disagrees on other points, and admits when he's not sure about something. Thank you Brian!
A few things to bear in mind. I think normalising the damage costs is challenging, and the data is noisy. Hence, it may be consistent with having no trend, but this is not the same as there being no trend. Also, I don't think we know what the null should be. In other words, what would the trend be in the absence of climate change. It's not obvious that it should be "no trend". As far as I'm aware, there are lots of factors that are not always considered in these analyses (better early warning systems, improved. building codes, etc). Hence, even if there is no trend, it's not immediately clear that that one can then conclude that there is no impact from climate change.
Perhaps I wasn't as clear as I could have been. I don't claim there is "no trend" in "normalized damage". I claim there's no trend in the number or intensity of storms. So, aside from some increase in damage from storm surges (which is not most of the damage from tropical storms), there's no reason to expect a trend in damage. As you note, there's some reason to expect a downward trend from early warning and improved building codes, but it's worth pointing out that these would not be possible without the prosperity that has come with the modern economy. It seems very ironic to me that the threat of storms to poor areas is taken as a justification for advocating policies such as elimination of fossil fuels that will keep these poor areas from achieving the prosperity that will let them protect themselves against storms and all the other hazards that poor countries face because they're poor.
I think one has to be cautious of making claims of "no trend" when data is quite sparse, especially given the rarity of the strongest TCs. Also, the motivation behind emission reductions is not simply that TCs may get stronger and more destructive. If that is all there was to be concerned about, maybe it would be better to simply develop better resilience through the continued use of fossil fuels. The key point is that the continued emission of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere will lead to global warming continuing, changes to many aspects of the climate, and other things like ocean acidification. This doesn't mean we should instantly stop using fossil fuels, but might suggest that we take this problem seriously and start thinking about how to invest in, and implement, alternatives.
The numbers on the cost of climate change vs the cost of current climate hysteria driven political policies clearly demonstrates we are on the wrong political trajectory with respect to how we are phasing out fossil energy in the west.
It's true tropical cyclones are trending stronger, yet the trend isn't as great as activists portray, and the real global warming driving this increase has both natural and human causes. Here's more on the science of climate change. https://normanjansen.substack.com/p/climate-catastrophe
I find this article long on speculation and short on details. The New York example is very weak. Sorry, not convincing at all except to the naive climate change alarmist groupies. This is typical propaganda. The devil is in the details. I'm a retired mechanical engineer with experience in failure analysis and I find climate change analysis to be too vague, lacking data, political, biased etc etc.
I'll help. NOAA data show that there is no trend in US hurricanes over the past 120 years. This is acknowledged in the IPCC citation Andrew helpfully provided.
Andy, If you'd unblock me on Twitter we could discuss this topic out in the open.
Meantime:
1. Your piece repeats a major error made in the IPCC (confusing fixes with storms):
https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/a-tip-from-an-ipcc-insider
2. Here is a more comprehensive look at the scientific consensus on tropical cyclones:
https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/2023-update-what-the-media-wont-tell
Hey Roger, ol' chum! Great to hear from you! Bringing the heat, as always, my friend! I can't believe I still block you, let me undo that immediately! Then we can hang out on twitter and reminisce about the great times we had, like the time you accused me without evidence of plagiarizing an oped! Man, that was hilarious! Now where's that unblock button ...
At this point in history, it's offensive that you're still out here making these arguments. We're talking about human lives and livelihoods, and vastly disproportionately poor and powerless ones. Your work in supporting the denial-industrial complex makes Andy's blaringly-obvious, unimaginative articles the only acceptable discourse on climate change -- because you create the imperative for debunkers like Andy to write these dry-as-dirt articles rather than opening space for poets, dreamers, and metaphoriticians like myself to gain any traction. Your efforts, and the efforts of people like you, are keeping the discourse around this issue stalled out in the 1990s, while the problem rapidly accelerates around us. At a minimum you owe us an honest disclosure: who is funding you, right now? Who is funding the army of anonymous trolls even here on substack that is arguing that climate change "isn't that bad" and "isn't a crisis"? We all know who stands to gain from all that labor.
Speaking of disgraceful...
By what right do you claim an authority to control who can engage in public debate? You claim no expertise, but nevertheless reject Roger's positions with ridiculous ad hominem attacks.
But it's much more disgraceful that you claim to be advocating for the poor and powerless by trying to keep them from getting access to the energy sources that can raise them out of poverty. Prosperity can help them improve nutrition, get access to good medical care, educate their children, and protect themselves from natural disasters. Denying them access to affordable energy doesn't look like protecting them.
Yeah, dude, I'm the Substack censorship board.
I'm not denying anyone access to anything; my substack is free to all, check it out. https://thespouter.substack.com/
How do we know you are not being funded?
check my substack & decide. i would like some money if you have it
OK but what is the policy bottom line? Principally that we need to use forward-looking modes of risk to build hazard-mitigating infrastructure and create incentives for building in areas that are less vulnerable to storm (or river flooding or wildfire) damage. Exactly how much ACC increases the potential for harm is neither hear nor there for harm reduction.
I do not see how resiliency "gets to" fossil fuels. Perhaps you mean that there are some uses of fossil fuels that can only be replaced extremely high cost. I agree with that and think that a least cost suite of net CO2 reducing technologies will include some carbon capture and sequestration.
I am sympathetic to the sense that the future can be better than the past notwithstanding the increase in CO2 concentrations. But it seems to me that one avenue of that better future is taking cost effective steps to reduce the increase net CO2 emissions. Perhaps your take is that cost effective mitigation of could be so effective that we need not reduce net emissions at all; investments in doing so necessarily have NPV<0 because there is no net benefit. That is quite a claim. Or am I still misunderstanding you?
Rob Bradley says "Stock, dense, reliable energies do that--dilute, intermittent energy flows do not."
Realize who this Bradley is that you are discussing the topic. He was speechwriter for Ken Lay of Enron. Not sure who he is working for now, but doesn't matter since fossil fuels are finite & non-renewable and we have to transition independent of climate change concerns. File it under the No Regrets strategy that people like Bradley are deathly afraid of becoming the next motto for the energy transition.
I said what I do or might agree with and invited him to clarify his position. I really do not care an interlocutor works for or did work for. I'll try to take his arguments seriously.
This is not an either/or issue, as you note (either climate change or societal change driving tropical cyclone *impacts*). But your argument appears to rely on the same tactic you disparage in others: "the selective emphasis of certain facts that bolster their stance."
For instance, I don't know how anyone can omit the vital NOAA guidance on hurricanes and climate change: https://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/global-warming-and-hurricanes/
You omit the abundant and vital array of studies of "paleotempestology" records showing that strong hurricanes can be frequent in periods when sea temperate were cooler: See Jeff Donnelly's work over the last two decades, a 2007 study I wrote up in The New York Times: "Over the last 5,000 years, the eastern Caribbean has experienced several periods, lasting centuries, in which strong hurricanes occurred frequently even though ocean temperatures were cooler than those measured today, according to a new study." https://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/24/science/earth/24storm.html
You're also way out of date. Relying on Kerry Emanuel's near-decade-old rebuttal to Roger's 538 post misses Roger's subsequent output (see links in his reply to this post) and misses Kerry's important recent work with PhD advisee Rapahel Rousseau-Rizzi nailing down that shifts in *aerosol* pollution have been the dominant shaper of recent North Atlantic hurricane patterns (not CO2-driven warming): Natural and anthropogenic contributions to the hurricane drought of the 1970s–1980s: https://texmex.mit.edu/pub/emanuel/PAPERS/Rousseau-Rizzi_Emanuel_2022_published.pdf
Andy,
As far as I can see, none of that actually contradicts what Andy has written in this post. All else being equal, warmer sea surface temperatures will tend to increase the intensity of a TC. However, there are other factors that could change the frequency of TCs, so that warming may lead to fewer TCs overall.
His post is about hurricane *destructiveness* and loss, with intensity just one of the factors that can increase loss. Most of the others are societal sources of vulnerability, as countless disaster researchers have found. Think back to Hurricane Dorian's damage in the Bahamas. Most of the islands recovered rapidly. The Haitian migrant workers who lived in the informal settlement called The Mudd were devastated. Same hurricane, different impacts. This Guardian report by David Smith really nailed the reality: 'The poor are punished': Dorian lays bare inequality in the Bahamas https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/sep/13/hurricane-dorian-the-mudd-haitians-inequality
Andy,
Again, none of that really changes that - all else being equal - TCs are (probably) becoming more destructive for the reasons Andy highlights in his post. Of course, the actual impact of a TC will be influenced by the resilience (or vulnerability) of the community that is impacted. The reslience of communities is not going to change by magic, and ignoring that TCs are likely to become more destructive as the planet warms is unlikely to help motivate investment in improving resilience.
With on this. What is important, to my eye, in the wider climate activism world is to reconsider the longstanding practice (goes back to An Inconvenient Truth) of making the climate > hurricanes story all about emissions reduction (discounting what you and I just stressed, which is the need to reduce risk by all means necessary).
Most TC activity originates from the tropical/equatorial band, where the AGW trend is absolutely swamped by surface temperature influenced by ENSO and other oceanic climate dipoles. Attribution at this point is moot. Consider I have better attribution of ENSO cycles arising from long-period tidal factors (Mf, Mm, Ss, Ssa, etc) than TC activity due to AGW. And that's because the fingerprint of ENSO can be mapped exactly to tidal cycles, whereas AGW is essentially a single degree-of-freedom -- a weak secular trend buried in the ocean's upwelling cycles.
At this moment in history, why do you think it's important to parse out the societal and geophysical factors of hurricane destructiveness? The fact is, both are getting worse simultaneously, and both are driven by human politics. Both can only be fixed with massive socialist government spending, which doesn't look likely.
I think it's important for people like you, whose voices have been so dominant in the climate/environmentalist movement, to interrogate whether you are facilitating political change or if you're acting as a buffer for the capitalist class. https://thespouter.substack.com/p/the-dialectics-of-liberal-environmentalism
I strongly sense - based on decades of reporting - that emissions-focused arguments for action are dangerously obscuring the need for aggressive changes on the ground to cut risk where vulnerability is greatest. Sift for the #expandingbullseye hashtag. Same issues in hurricane, fire, flood zones both rich and poor. Here's a snippet from Florida: https://revkin.substack.com/p/grappling-with-catastrophe-after-22-09-28 Here from Clorado wildfire country: https://revkin.substack.com/p/building-forward-safer-where-communities-22-01-05 And emissions cuts are needed forever, as I've been wirting since 1988.
Well, you've been writing since 1988, and I've been writing since 2012, and I'd be honored if you'd take a look at my work. Respect
https://thespouter.substack.com/p/hydrocarbon-corpse-juice-main-part
"It is likely that the global proportion of Category 3–5 tropical cyclone instances … have increased globally over the past 40 years." (Section 11.7.1.2)
Andrew, I know you do this as a hobby, and I appreciate that you cite the IPCC, but you are cherry picking. Why limit yourself to the past 40 years? We know that there is lot of decadal variability (and even annual auto-correlation) when it comes to hurricanes, and therefore the longer the observation period the better. Why not cite the first paragraph of the very same section?
"There is low confidence in most reported long-term (multi-decadal to centennial) trends in TC frequency- or intensity-based metrics"
Based on these long term trends I'd argue it is incorrect to say "with some certainty that TCs are on average more intense than those that form in a cooler climate."
1. Tropical cyclones are becoming more destructive: sea level. This seems to be a strong case. It argues for stronger protections against floods and storm surges.
2. Tropical cyclones are becoming more destructive: rainfall. This seems like a good intuitive case. You cite the IPCC's conclusion that climate change is responsible for extreme rainfall in Hurricane Harvey. I'm curious if there's been any systematic measurement of rainfall from tropical cyclones over time. I can't find any reference to such studies. I know there are models predicting that anthropogenic causes will increase rainfall, decrease translation speeds, etc. It would be nice if there were any historical data to identify things like: What's a normal range for rainfall from a hurricane? Has there been a trend in rainfall from hurricanes? Does any of this change over the multi-decadal cycles observed in hurricane activity? Aside from modeling, is there any evidence of anthropogenic causes to any of this?
3. Tropical cyclones are becoming more destructive: intensity. This claim seems much less established. The abstract of the article you link for "basic physics" doesn't claim that overall warming temperatures make hurricanes more intense - it actually states "the factors that control the intensity of hurricanes are still poorly understood, leading to almost no reliability in forecasts of hurricane intensity evolution." Your quotes from the IPCC are hardly compelling. "It is likely that the global proportion of Category 3–5 tropical cyclone instances … have increased globally over the past 40 years." But the same section of the IPCC report notes that "A subset of the best-track data corresponding to hurricanes that have directly impacted the USA since 1900 is considered to be reliable, and shows no trend in the frequency of USA landfall events". NOAA data also shows no trend in the number or proportion of Category 3-5 hurricanes in the same period. It is clear that Atlantic hurricane activity has increased over the last 40-50 years, but this is because the 1970s were the decade of lowest recorded activity ever. The increase since then is clearly, at least in part, a return to "normal" levels of activity. Your conclusion "You can say with some certainty that TCs are on average more intense than those that form in a cooler climate." is utterly unsupported by any of the sources you mention, or any other published data I've seen.
4. What we’re not sure about: number of tropical cyclones. Well, I'm not sure, either, aside from what I mentioned above. Enough said on that.
5. What we’re not sure about: monetary damage from tropical cyclones. You claim that Professor Kerry explains why it's wrong to claim no trend in "normalized" damage from tropical storms. I won't wade into this debate because it covers only 23 years' worth of data. But, as noted in 3. above, there's no trend over the last 120 years in the number of storms making US landfall, or in their intensity. There may be some increase from storm surge damage due to rising sea level, but it seems pretty clear that any other trend has to be due to simply having more property, and more valuable property, in storm-affected areas. You cite the wisdom of insurance companies in raising rates and withdrawing from Florida, but the insurance companies claim the rates are rising because of increasing fraud, aided by a 2017 Florida Supreme Court decision that made fraudulent claims harder and more expensive for insurance companies to fight. https://www.insurance.com/home-and-renters-insurance/home-insurers-leaving-florida
Point 1 seems to be strong. The others seem to range from speculative to unsupportable. If you have stronger evidence, I'd like to see it.
This is a high quality comment. Brian calmly evaluates the author's arguments, cites quality references, and avoids falling into the trap of binary thinking. He agrees with the author on the first point, disagrees on other points, and admits when he's not sure about something. Thank you Brian!
A few things to bear in mind. I think normalising the damage costs is challenging, and the data is noisy. Hence, it may be consistent with having no trend, but this is not the same as there being no trend. Also, I don't think we know what the null should be. In other words, what would the trend be in the absence of climate change. It's not obvious that it should be "no trend". As far as I'm aware, there are lots of factors that are not always considered in these analyses (better early warning systems, improved. building codes, etc). Hence, even if there is no trend, it's not immediately clear that that one can then conclude that there is no impact from climate change.
Perhaps I wasn't as clear as I could have been. I don't claim there is "no trend" in "normalized damage". I claim there's no trend in the number or intensity of storms. So, aside from some increase in damage from storm surges (which is not most of the damage from tropical storms), there's no reason to expect a trend in damage. As you note, there's some reason to expect a downward trend from early warning and improved building codes, but it's worth pointing out that these would not be possible without the prosperity that has come with the modern economy. It seems very ironic to me that the threat of storms to poor areas is taken as a justification for advocating policies such as elimination of fossil fuels that will keep these poor areas from achieving the prosperity that will let them protect themselves against storms and all the other hazards that poor countries face because they're poor.
I think one has to be cautious of making claims of "no trend" when data is quite sparse, especially given the rarity of the strongest TCs. Also, the motivation behind emission reductions is not simply that TCs may get stronger and more destructive. If that is all there was to be concerned about, maybe it would be better to simply develop better resilience through the continued use of fossil fuels. The key point is that the continued emission of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere will lead to global warming continuing, changes to many aspects of the climate, and other things like ocean acidification. This doesn't mean we should instantly stop using fossil fuels, but might suggest that we take this problem seriously and start thinking about how to invest in, and implement, alternatives.
The numbers on the cost of climate change vs the cost of current climate hysteria driven political policies clearly demonstrates we are on the wrong political trajectory with respect to how we are phasing out fossil energy in the west.
It's true tropical cyclones are trending stronger, yet the trend isn't as great as activists portray, and the real global warming driving this increase has both natural and human causes. Here's more on the science of climate change. https://normanjansen.substack.com/p/climate-catastrophe
I find this article long on speculation and short on details. The New York example is very weak. Sorry, not convincing at all except to the naive climate change alarmist groupies. This is typical propaganda. The devil is in the details. I'm a retired mechanical engineer with experience in failure analysis and I find climate change analysis to be too vague, lacking data, political, biased etc etc.
LOL!
Oh OK, you want a serious answer. I don't know if you saw this post, but check out point 4: https://theclimatebrink.substack.com/p/climate-change-is-making-hurricanes
I'll help. NOAA data show that there is no trend in US hurricanes over the past 120 years. This is acknowledged in the IPCC citation Andrew helpfully provided.