Abstract Atlantic hurricanes are a major hazard to life and property, and a topic of intense scientific interest. Historical changes in observing practices limit the utility of century-scale records of Atlantic major hurricane frequency. To evaluate past changes in frequency, we have here developed a homogenization method for Atlantic hurricane and major hurricane frequency over 1851–2019. We find that recorded century-scale increases in Atlantic hurricane and major hurricane frequency, and associated decrease in USA hurricanes strike fraction, are consistent with changes in observing practices and not likely a true climate trend. After homogenization, increases in basin-wide hurricane and major hurricane activity since the 1970s are not part of a century-scale increase, but a recovery from a deep minimum in the 1960s–1980s. We suggest internal (e.g., Atlantic multidecadal) climate variability and aerosol-induced mid-to-late-20th century major hurricane frequency reductions have probably masked century-scale greenhouse-gas warming contributions to North Atlantic major hurricane frequency.
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Weather is not climate and hurricanes are weather. What, then, does climate mean? There is a rough consensus on that, climate is '30 years of weather trends'. In other words - used by NOAA among others - 'climate is what you expect, weather is what you get'. Whether or not the current hurricane season turns out to be 'unimpressive' as it currently seems to be or whether it develops into something more 'exiting' is not that interesting seen in the light of climatology. What is interesting it the trend over a longer period [1] which shows a clear reduction in the number of tropical cyclones (typhoons, tropical storms and hurricanes) in most basins (regions for tropical…
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cyclone formation, roughly corresponding with sea basins) with the exception of the North Atlantic region which saw a decline from the 1870s to the 1970s followed by an increase back to the level of around 1900 [2]. This increase in observed Atlantic hurricanes in combination with an observed decrease in the number of hurricanes making landfall is probably due to improvements in weather observations instead of a true increase in frequency [3].
When a hurricane does make landfall the trend is for them to be more expensive and less deadly, the former due to the fact that areas previously deemed unsuitable for construction like flood plains and other low-lying areas have been used for construction, the latter due to better prognoses.
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-022-01388-4
[2] https://media.springernature.com/full/springer-static/image/...
[3] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-24268-5
But that's absurd to think that you can make claims about the climate based off of a few years worth of data. Multidecadal variance is part of the climate system.
Hurricanes in the US are basically flat [1][2][3]. The past thousand years have seen wild swings, but it's due to natural variability [4].
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/hurricane-landfalls-us [2] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ace-north-atlantic-hurric... [3] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-24268-5#Sec2 [4] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-45112-6
> No kidding, but to say that climate change did this when hurricanes have been on the decline the last thirty years is misleading. This is weather and engineering failures.
> https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-24268-5
This HN user categorically and obsessively has their own opinion on climate change, and how it is influenced by humans.
Their "evidence research" is taking the first Google search result that they believe to support their position in the discussion at hand - even if it doesn't make sense (hurricanes in North America versus Mediterranean).
If they don't invest in such sloppy research, their arguments hit rock-bottom Tiktok factoid niveau. one can better just assume nonsense/randomizing/lying and ignore this user for anything climate-related.
No kidding, but to say that climate change did this when hurricanes have been on the decline the last thirty years is misleading. This is weather and engineering failures.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-24268-5
Contrast with this analysis published in Nature:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-27364-8.epdf
"Historical records of Atlantic hurricane activity, extending back to 1851, show increasing activity over time, but much or all of this trend has been attributed to lack of observations in the early portion of the record. Here we use a tropical cyclone downscaling model driven by three global climate analyses that are based mostly on sea surface temperature and surface pressure data. The results support earlier statistically-based inferences that storms were undercounted in the 19th century, but in contrast to earlier work, show increasing tropical cyclone activity…
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through the period, interrupted by a prominent hurricane drought in the 1970s and 80 s that we attribute to anthropogenic aerosols. In agreement with earlier work, we show that most of the variability of North Atlantic tropical cyclone activity over the last century was directly related to regional rather than global climate change. Most metrics of tropical cyclones downscaled over all the tropics show weak and/or insignificant trends over the last century, illustrating the special nature of North Atlantic tropical cyclone climatology."
Ditto:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-24268-5
"Atlantic hurricanes are a major hazard to life and property, and a topic of intense scientific interest. Historical changes in observing practices limit the utility of century-scale records of Atlantic major hurricane frequency. To evaluate past changes in frequency, we have here developed a homogenization method for Atlantic hurricane and major hurricane frequency over 1851–2019. We find that recorded century-scale increases in Atlantic hurricane and major hurricane frequency, and associated decrease in USA hurricanes strike fraction, are consistent with changes in observing practices and not likely a true climate trend. After homogenization, increases in basin-wide hurricane and major hurricane activity since the 1970s are not part of a century-scale increase, but a recovery from a deep minimum in the 1960s–1980s. We suggest internal (e.g., Atlantic multidecadal) climate variability and aerosol-induced mid-to-late-20th century major hurricane frequency reductions have probably masked century-scale greenhouse-gas warming contributions to North Atlantic major hurricane frequency."
EDIT: Additional citation.
The Fermi paradox is the conflict between an expectation of a high {\em ex ante} probability of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe and the apparently lifeless universe we in fact observe.
Siavash Golkar, Mariel Pettee, Michael Eickenberg +11
Due in part to their discontinuous and discrete default encodings for numbers, Large Language Models (LLMs) have not yet been commonly used to process numerically-dense scientific datasets.