TCW‘s Paul Homewood is a man of many parts. When I came across his highly informed climate sceptic site Not A Lot Of People Know That several years ago I approached him to write a regular weekly column for us. The first appeared on Friday October 26, 2018. Since then he and we have not looked back in keeping scepticism alive, not following the science but carefully examining it.
Over this period Paul has researched and authored the Global Warming Policy Foundation’s annual reports on The State of the UK Climate, and the UK’s weather, as here for example, as well as their periodic reviews of hurricane activity, the most recent of which for 2024 was published this week.
This review, like the previous ones, is based on the findings of key scientific bodies which he compares with sensationalist news reporting and popular perceptions that result. Contrary to received wisdom his update confirms that:
- Trends in landfalling Atlantic/western Pacific hurricanes have been stable or decreasing since 1950;
- There is also no global trend in overall hurricane frequency since reliable records began in the 1970s;
- The apparent increase in the number of hurricanes since the 19th century has been due to changes in observation practices over the years, rather than an actual increase;
- Data show no long-term trends in US landfalling hurricanes since the mid-19th century, when systematic records began, either in terms of frequency or intensity;
- Similarly, after allowing for the fact that many storms were not spotted prior to the satellite era, there are no such trends in Atlantic hurricanes either;
- There is growing evidence that wind speeds of the most powerful hurricanes may now be overestimated in comparison to pre-satellite era ones because of changing methods of measurement;
- The increase in Atlantic hurricanes in the last 50 years is not part of a long-term trend, but is linked to a recovery from a deep minimum in hurricane activity in the 1970s associated with the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation.
Paul says: ‘The observational findings of meteorological agencies in 2024 once again confound those who claim to see a “climate crisis” in the hurricane data’, and that ‘it is clear that we have not seen an increase in hurricane frequency, even though the public have been scared into thinking that tropical storms are getting worse’.
The gap between media hype, popular perceptions and the reality of empirical data is becoming ever more evident, thanks to Paul’s painstaking work on the data. The facts he sets out are a welcome corrective to misleading news coverage of hurricanes.
You can read the full paper here. The 2024 Hurricane Season (pdf)
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