Hurricanes

Status: Clear Consensus

“There is essentially no long-term trend in hurricane counts. The evidence for an upward trend is even weaker if we look at U.S. landfilling hurricanes, which even show a slight negative trend beginning from 1900 or from the late 1800s.

We conclude that the data do not provide compelling evidence for a substantial greenhouse warming-induced century-scale increase in: frequency of tropical storms, hurricanes, or major hurricanes, or in the proportion of hurricanes that become major.”

— NOAA

“There has been no significant trend in the global number of tropical cyclones nor has any trend been identified in the number of U.S. land-falling hurricanes.”

— NCA, 2014

"Any single event, such as a severe tropical cyclone [hurricane or typhoon], cannot be attributed to human-induced climate change, given the current status of scientific understanding.”

— WMO (World Meteorological Organization)

Confidence in large scale changes in the intensity of extreme extratropical cyclones since 1900 is low.

— IPCC, AR5

A Question of Science

There is a decoupling of sea surface temperature to the power dissipation index in recent years. Scientists are unable to explain this phenomenon.

“[T]here is still no consensus on the relative magnitude of human and natural influences on past changes in Atlantic hurricane activity, and particularly on which factor has dominated the observed increase (Ting et al., 2015) and it remains uncertain whether past changes in Atlantic TC activity are outside the range of natural variability.”

— IPCC, AR6

IPCC

Directly from the IPCC reports.