A recent article posted by CBS News, Chicago asks the question on nobody’s mind: “Will climate change put the Chicago area at heightened risk for hurricanes?” This question and the thinking behind it are ridiculous. Although it is true that the remnants of tropical storms and hurricanes can reach Chicago, and have in the past, there is little reason to think that climate change will make it more likely to occur in the future or more severe if or when it does.
CBS claims that the recent hurricane Helene “brought tropical flooding to inland regions not typically at risk,” warning that it’s now clear that “climate disasters can happen anywhere.” Besides the obvious issue of CBS conflating climate (long term average) with weather (a short term event), it is also untrue that it’s unusual for hurricanes to bring heavy rain inland. In fact, hurricane related flooding has occurred in the Appalachians long before industrialization could be blamed. The flood of 1916 in Asheville, North Carolina was much worse than this recent one.
If that wasn’t silly enough, CBS turns to the unscientific realm of rapid attribution studies to claim that human contributions to climate change “fueled Milton’s rapid intensification, according to Climate Central,” and asks the question “[a]s the impacts of climate change get worse faster, what, if anything, could reach Illinois now or in the future from hurricanes?”
This question carries a tiny thread of truth, that is, that the remnants of tropical storms and hurricanes can and do affect regions far away from the coasts, with CBS giving the examples of Hurricane Ike and Tropical Storm Lowell, the latter of which which caused flooding in Chicago that was severe enough to warrant an emergency declaration in 2008. However, this is not new, and the evidence CBS uses to try to frighten readers into believing that hurricanes will soon pose a greater threat up north is mere propaganda and not real data.
CBS cites Climate Central, a climate activism and advocacy group which is often caught spreading fake news and misleading information about climate science in order to push alarmist narratives. For instance, they touted the University of Maine’s faulty climate reanalyzer in 2023 as though it represented measured data when it does not. CBS also references rapid attribution analyses from groups like World Weather Attribution. Climate Realism has covered their false “science” assertions many times, where they use counterfactual computer models to claim that any given storm is the result of human-caused climate change. There will never be a weather event that World Weather Attribution can’t tie to climate change, because they begin with the assumption that climate change juices every weather event.
The reason mainstream media organizations like CBS rely on attribution study groups instead of real data, is because the available data do not show that hurricanes are getting more intense, wetter, or more frequent. Although Climate Realism has covered hurricanes many times this season (here, here, and here, just in the last 2 weeks), it is worth going over the facts again.
Major hurricanes, according to global hurricane frequency data, are not getting more common, nor are less powerful hurricanes. (See figure below)
In regards to strength, there is no demonstrable increasing trend in global accumulated cyclone energy. If that’s not enough, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Sixth Assessment Report, in Chapter 12, Table 12.12, identifies no connection between tropical cyclones and climate change. Not in the present, or the future, even under extreme emissions scenarios. (See figure below)
Facts are inconvenient for climate hucksters like CBS, which end up looking like fools trying to ignore reality in order to frighten readers in places like Chicago. Yes, the remnants of a hurricane or tropical storm can make it up to Chicago, but no, there is no indication that such occurrences are common or are set to become a frequent problem in the future. CBS has to know this, otherwise they would not rely so heavily on the nebulous claims of attribution artists.
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If hurricane X goes over an ocean that is 1C higher than normal, the hurricane will be worse.
Simple math.
Such simplistic understanding of the climate is exactly what facilitates alarmists getting away with the outrageous lies that they peddle. The term ‘useful idiot’ comes irrevocably to mind.
I don’t know … if the hurricane “targeted” from city to city to maintain it’s heat from the Urban Heat Island effect, it might reach Chicago. But why it want to go there? 😎
Except that hasn’t happened!
ie, your comment is based on AGW mantra BS.
What made the ocean 1ºC warmer? Certainly not ‘back radiating’ CO2.
If hurricane Y moves into an area with higher wind-shear in the upper atmosphere it will be “torn apart” and reduced to a tropical depression.
More than 50 years of empirical observations via aircraft and satellites.
“It is better to remain silent at the risk of being thought a fool, than to talk and remove all doubt of it.” —Maurice Switzer.
It is not simple math. It is not simple.
I read the headline, and almost thought that it was hurricane doom clickbait porn. First, Illinois is landlocked. Second, tornadoes already do more Midwestern structural damage than any hurricane would. Oh, and Illinois is on a flood plain ..
Chicago is a port
Because we built the St. Lawrence Seaway with fossil fuels.
Lake Michigan does not typically spawn hurricanes
and a Windy City.
However, the nickname seems to come because the young and growing city was full of “windbags,” people with inflated egos.
Nothing changes. Now they inflate hurricane risk and think they’re clever.
Very nice Linnea. The CAGW hucksters have nothing that is why every bad storm is so important to them. They are singing the same old song they have been singing for the past 30 years or so. They are scraping the bottom of the barrel.
Betteridge’s law of headlines states: “Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word NO.”
Ryan Maue’s charts say all any non-specialist wants or needs to know about storm trends but it’s doubtful media types with degrees in journalism can read simple charts and graphs.
The Great Lakes already get near hurricane storms. My first exposure to this fact was Gordon Lightfoot’s The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald in the mid 1970s
https://youtu.be/9vST6hVRj2A?si=8pE1r3xp5rYKGinm
Very contrary to some beliefs, hurricanes and their remnants often reach far inland, they just don’t strike the coastlines and quit.
I got caught in the remnants of Hurricane Isaac in August of 2012 that reached into the state of Missouri. Took a little trip on a recumbent pedal tricycle from Denver, CO to Pensacola, FL. In late August, early September I was on the Katy Trail near Columbia, MO when the rain began to pour down for 3 days. Very fortunate that I was at Cooper’s Landing campground where I pitched a tent. While we were all waiting out the rain, Cooper’s Landing had live performers for 2 of the 3 days of blues and bluegrass music.
Indeed! Camille nailed Germantown, Tenessee pretty hard in ’69. I could barely see my hand at the end of my arm the rain was so intense, and that was the short arm of a nine-year-old.
Someone should test where the line between free speech and yelling “fire” in a crowded theater is.
CBS wants to be a trusted source of information. With this comes a high degree of responsibility … aka … they have to at least attempt to understand and report the subject matter from all sides of the issue. This avoids the “fear monger” label. Fear monger being synonymous with yelling “fire” in a crowded theater.
As a CPA, if I conducted myself as today’s news organizations do I would lose my license. Yet, I am not surprised that they do what they do. They were taught, trained and follow ethically bankrupt people. I suspect the overuse of conjecture gives them a pass.
MR. WATTS WHO IS ADDRESSING THIS BASIC FLAW OF CLIMATE CHANGE?
Hi I’ve commented here before, I’m a PhD, I have an accredited lab for biological testing, we monitor germs in facilities and do analyses that also apply to the food industry, for testing E. Coli.
I’m a revalidated chemist before working in biology, in the commonwealth of Puerto Rico 🇵🇷, where in from. My job today is running investigations of biological contamination. I’m 57 YO, have spent a lot of my profession on research.
I’m very annoyed at the process that people use to push the climate change agenda without real science. We are subjected to accreditation, we have to investigate and do analysis based on FDA regulations, international standards (ISO’s), the United Sates pharmacopeia (USP)
and internal lab standards of operations (SOP’s). This ensures equality across scientific investigations. Inside the pharmaceutical industry, the instructions from all of those sources demand layers of corroboration. We have to have tests for all materials/drugs/chemicals for identity, purity, and safety; then the tests for doing those experimental tests themselves need tests to corroborate that the tests work; the tests that tests the tests themselves have to be challenged on purpose to study if they are still the appropriate tests to tests the tests, …. Layers of corroboration, very costly that take extensive scientific investigations. It takes me 9 days to have a report of germinal contamination in a facility, following international standards of methods of experimental investigations. It takes a few seconds of “research” do declare a hurricane caused by climate change.
i don’t understand where the climate change claim has those same level of corroboration that the government asks to the industry. It’s a double standard that the government pushes the agenda without showing to the public the same level and greater methods of corroboration that they expect the commercial science to do for them, to sell a drug, or a medical device, food, cosmetics, … we in the industry have a much higher level of authenticity, confidence and credibility for our science investigations, whereas the government doesn’t.
.
I had a science channel in YouTube with a hundred videos of college chemistry teaching started during the pandemic. It got canceled by YouTube after I did a raw unofficial video of a talk I did in Spanish about the fundamental flaws that climate change has from the view of physics, chemistry and biology combined, as nature is supposed to be. There are some 3 to 4 basic issues of the climate change that fundamentally make it fail as a true science. I’ve found many other scientists outside the funds convenience questioning a lot of fundamental science that climate change cannot respond, particularly with layers of corroboration. I myself have a strong point inside quantum mechanics: CO2 uses infrared energy, bounced by the earth initially sent as ultraviolet from the sun, to VIBRATE faster; infrared energy makes CO2 wiggle faster, the energy absorbed is CONSUMED in kinetic energy, NOT THERMAL, to heat up the surrounding. That’s been very clear in the chapter of infrared spectroscopy of CO2. They have major flaws in their methods of investigations: it’s trashy science, superficial, half truth, disconnected, irrational.
We can show with science that they have been misunderstanding what CO2 does with IR energy. It’s not for thermal irradiation like the heat coming out of living bodies; it’s not coming out, it’s rather coming in and consumed in motion. The only generated heat is by molecular frictions. But at 0.04% CO2 in the atmosphere, the heat is only local, shouldn’t be statistically significant to change the overall atmospheric temperature, forget about causing catastrophes, destructions and extinctions, that’s an overstatement without layers of corroboration: does the government have samples of soils, waters, airs, microbes, animals, and any other bio-physical process that altogether can prove climate change is real.
When the millions and billions and trillions of years of climate data are considered, no one has demonstrated beyond doubt that what’s been observed is not natural variability. For the evaluation of nature, as a hardcore scientist of running daily scientific investigations on living organisms, I’m telling you that the common statistical evaluations of averages and standard deviations, are not exactly the right method of investigation. Whatever they are calculating inside the government, or IPCC, if they are feeding their models with standard statistics, that’s not going to evaluate correctly nature 😀👎. The methods are not appropriate for that degree of natural bio-chemical-physical variability. There are more advanced analysis, I use mathematical fits and geometrical analysis to observe long term trends. Because it too advanced, you don’t see many doing it. Is there a way to discuss climate science validity?
0,00000000000000002% is greater than 0,00000000000000001%
First two sentences in the above article:
“A recent article posted by CBS News, Chicago asks the question on nobody’s mind: ‘Will climate change put the Chicago area at heightened risk for hurricanes?’ This question and the thinking behind it are ridiculous.”
Exactly . . . ridiculous! . . . let’s start with this: Hey, CBS News Chicago, please give us your unambiguous definition of what the term “climate change” means in your opinion.
Is it global warming, a natural process demonstrated over tens, if not hundreds, of separate climate cycles, including recoveries from glacial periods and major Ice Ages?
Is it excessive rainfall, or excessive drought?
Is it accelerating sea level rise, or essentially-constant sea level rise rate as expected from global warming?
Is it increasing amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere, with the current level of about 420 ppm being a fraction of the levels of 1,000–1,600 ppm that paleoclimatology proxies show existed during the Eocene epoch, which Earth (and life on it) not only survived but spontaneously recovered from?
Does it consider the fact that Earth still has permanent ice caps a both poles, reflecting the established fact that it is currently in the Ice Age called the “Quaternary”, which began about 2.6 million year ago?
“If you can’t define something you have no formal rational way of knowing that it exists. Neither can you really tell anyone else what it is. There is, in fact, no formal difference between inability to define and stupidity.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values