PSA: Warming Is NOT Causing More Hurricanes

Since every year, each hurricane I have to pay attention to comes along with climate catastrophists hectoring us about their pet (non-)crisis, it is nice to see a rebuttal at Issues and Insights.

It reads in part:

Going back more than a 100 years, we can see from the data that today's hurricane activity, defined as a hurricane making landfall in the continental U.S., is roughly the same as it was at the turn of the previous century. As author Michael Shellenberger says, the media have "lied about hurricanes," "lied about heat waves," "lied about floods," and of course "all they do is lie about fires."

The climate mob has also lied about snowfall, polar ice, polar bears, the temperature record, and the reliability of their warming models. [links in original]

Note the copious supply of links I left in. The article is a handy quick reference that way.

My only quarrel with the piece comes from the paragraph immediately preceding the excerpt, which debunks the claim that climate-related fatalities are on the rise.

I don't dispute that at all, but that is a missed opportunity to bring the concept of climate mastery into the public's awareness.

Fortunately, the economist Bryan Caplan explores the idea at his Substack blog, and quotes Epstein freely. (I have supplied the page numbers for these within Fossil Future below for your convenience.)

[T]he history of climate safety shows that fossil-fueled machine labor makes us far safer from climate -- a phenomenon I call "climate mastery." (Fossil Future, p. 49)

Epstein, again quoted by Caplan, elaborates:

Climate Mastery: Ever-improving models allow millions to decide whether or not to evacuate. Neither prediction nor speedy escape -- both made possible with fossil fuels -- were options a century ago. (Image by The National Hurricane Center, via site archives, public domain.)

[O]ver the last century, as CO2 emissions have most rapidly increased, the climate disaster death rate fell by an incredible 98 percent. That means the average person is fifty times less likely to die of a climate-related cause than they were in the 1920s.

The first time I read this statistic, I didn't think it was possible. But rechecking the data repeatedly, I found that was indeed the case: the rate of climate-related disaster deaths has fallen by 98 percent over the last century.

This means that not only does our knowledge system ignore the massive, life-or-death benefits of fossil fuels, but it has a track record of being 180 degrees wrong about the supposedly catastrophic side-effect of climate danger -- which has dramatically decreased. (47-48)

Epstein's concept backs the climate catastrophists who deny climate mastery into a corner: Even if, for the sake of argument, we allow that climate is causing more disasters, they would still have to explain why relatively fewer people are dying from them, despite there being more of us. Indeed, as if the lower death rate weren't impressive enough, do note that the absolute numbers also fell for the items discussed by Issues and Insights.

-- CAV