Another Global Warming/Climate Change Lie: No Climate Change isn't driving an increase in strong hurricanes

A new study, by government funded folks who depend on the climate crisis being real to keep getting paid, allegedly shows that climate change is causing a significant increase in strong hurricanes.

It's totally wrong.

The main data point in the new study is that when examining hurricanes in the period between 1979 and 2017 there probability that a tropical storm grew into a hurricane increased by 8%.

That's a tiny variation and hardly likely to be significant as you can see by looking at a plot showing the number of tropical storms and hurricanes in each year from 1970 to 2019.

Clearly the year to year variation of the ratio of tropical storms to hurricanes is bouncing all over the place so that simply averaging for 20 years is unlikely to show an real difference.

Further we can see form the chart that the number of hurricanes hasn't been changing much though there was a downward trend from 1992 through 2014.  It's likely that the 1979 through 2017 time period was selected to exclude the high number of hurricanes in the early 1970s.

With data like that in the chart you can pick different time periods and you'll find all sorts of different averages. An 8% variation is very likely well within the expected normal variations.

Also note that instead of saying that the number of hurricanes have been increasing, which is what we care about and which isn't the case, the study says that the number of tropical storms that become hurricanes have increased.

The problem with that metric is that if the number of tropical storms declines, as it did around 2010, then the number of hurricanes goes down even if the probability of any given storm producing a hurricane goes up.

The #FakeNews media added their spin. The Washington Post's headline said:

“The strongest, most dangerous hurricanes are now far more likely.”

That contains two lies. 

The first is that the study isn't talking about the frequency of major hurricanes increasing, which it isn't as you can see by looking at the chart above, but about an increase in the frequency of tropical storms becoming hurricanes. 

The second is that an 8% increase is means something is "far more likely".

Another reason why you can trust nothing the #FakeNews media says about Global Warming...err Climate Change.