In September 2025, no hurricanes made landfall in the United States — the first time that’s happened in a decade. What’s going on with this year’s hurricane season?
We ask WeatherBELL Analytics’ Joe Bastardi, one of America’s best hurricane forecasters, to share his insights. In Episode #177 of The Climate Realism Show, The Heartland Institute’s Anthony Watts, Sterling Burnett, Linnea Lueken, and Jim Lakely also tackle the Crazy Climate News of the Week, including a misleading Bloomberg chart that “climate denialists can’t ignore,” how arson, not “climate change,” caused the Pacific Palisades fire, why the predicted increase in EF5 tornadoes never materialized, and how inhalers are now being targeted by climate activists.
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The next headline: “No hurricanes in September Is a Problem”
Corrected: “No hurricanes making landfall in September Is a Problem”
. . . wait for it! . . . caused, of course, by climate change.
“Climate change” is protecting the land from hurricanes?
So what’s the problem? 😎
The “problem” is, of course, that almost all AGW/CAGW alarmists claim that global warming is causing an INCREASE in all types of storms in terms of both frequency and intensity.
Presumably, this would mean more September hurricanes, and thus more making landfall somewhere.
It’s a problem of, first, false claims and, second, statistics being applied to nature.
BTW, September is the peak month for Atlantic hurricane season activity.
Finally, it’s a strange belief system that considers climate change as “protecting” any geographical area . . . I wonder what Gaia has to say about that?
Everything is a “problem”, obviously.
This was already the headline in the Washington Pest some years ago.
Something like
“Hurricane drought – and why it is a bad thing.”
On the other hand we had reports that so much more damage was done by Hurricanes and that people and insurers are suffering.
One wonders how a decrease in Hurricanes lead to more damage?
Accumulation of low-level ozone and sun damage. /sarc
How did all the low and mid level ozone only fail to neutralize all the CFC’s so they could travel all the way up to the arctics to dig some holes into the layers?
Because nobody knows what a “normal” level of ozone is…anywhere.
So claiming a “hole” is simply nonsense.
Also ozone has a rather short halflife so if there is a problem it would rather be a production problem rather than a consumption (by cfc’s) problem.
The most obvious nonsense with the ozone hole is the fact that they only had data for a handful of years before they started the BS.
At best since 1969.
It is absolutely impossible to determine anything with only a few years of data about anything of this size longterm.
They simple had no base at all.
The 2nd impossible thing is that they pretend to have arctic extent data only since 1979.
How can you observe an invisible hole of an invisible gas, but not the very visible arctics below it.
Fact is that they have arctic data since the Nimbus satellites 1964,
but 1979 had the biggest ice extent = highest propaganda value.
The 3rd crazy thing is the fact that 80% of CFC’s was released in the northern hemisphere.
The south has only a few million aussies.
China and India were 3rd world, south America 2nd therefore their CFC output was very low.
Yet the Ozone hole in Antarctica was way bigger.
Jusrt as with climate the main ozone hole factor is the sun.
Well, if it was just the Sun, ozone in N and S hemispheres would on average be the same 6 months apart, won’t they?
So, sunlight and cold air.
Which is kind of hilarious, given that the re-run of that show promises lack of cold air. I suppose it must be somehow bad either way, like with those hurricanes.
The Washington Post already ran that headline several years ago. I’m out in the weeds on an IPad, otherwise I’d slapit up here. If I remember, I’ll post it on Sunday (-:
NOAA predictions for the 2025 hurricane season in the Atlantic, a 70% confidence of:
— 13 to 19 total named storms
— 6-10 are forecast to become hurricanes (winds of 74 mph or higher)
— 3-5 major hurricanes (category 3, 4 or 5; with winds of 111 mph or higher)
(ref: https://www.noaa.gov/news-release/noaa-predicts-above-normal-2025-atlantic-hurricane-season )
And with a little more than seven weeks to go until the official end (Nov 30) of the Atlantic hurricane season and only 9 named tropical storms so far, we will a new named tropical storm every 13 days to reach just the lower limit of NOAA’s prediction.
Such can’t be ruled out, but it’s looking very improbable.
As of October 10, 2025, the Atlantic Ocean weather is currently quiet, with no named tropical cyclones in the North Atlantic, Caribbean Sea, or Gulf of
AmericaMexico. And the peak of the the hurricane season passed long ago.Generally like your comments. Not to get too political or too far off topic but I think your “Gulf of
AmericaMexico” comment is unwarranted. My son married a first generation Vietnamese girl (Yeah, I know, what’s the connection with Mexico) with extended family that immigrated from Vietnam after the war. I recently saw one of her uncles wearing a Gulf of America hat. If it’s good enough for a Vietnamese immigrant to support, it’s good enough for me.We’ve had words taken away from us – the words for being happy, a bundle of sticks or metal ingot, prismatic atmospheric colors in the sky, and a word for slowing the timing of the spark in an ICE, for examples. We’re taking this one. Get use to it. Gulf of America.
jtom as well as Phil R,
Thanks for your reply comments but my strike-through comment was intentionally meant to reflect the fact that US citizens, via Congress, NEVER granted to Donald Trump the authority to change the names of natural features bordering the United States, such as the Gulf of Mexico . . . that power has long been assigned to the the U.S. Board on Geographic Names (BGN), with the United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names (UNGEGN) providing guidelines and resolving disputes for naming transboundary features.
Last I heard, neither the BGN not the UNGEGN has approved of a geographical feature called the “Gulf of America”.
I’ll never “get used” to dictatorial-like pronouncements from a US President, white, black, yellow or orange.
Ahem… “Following President Trump’s Executive Order 14172, “Restoring Names That Honor American Greatness,” Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum signed on February 7 Secretary’s Order 3423, “The Gulf of America,” and directed the BGN to immediately rename the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America.”
https://www.usgs.gov/news/featured-story/directed-president-gulf-america-enters-usgs-official-place-names-database
Trump directing the BGN to rename the Gulf and changing Denali back to Mount McKinley is no different than Obama’s EO changing McKinley to Denali in 2015.
Ahem . . . you might notice that an Executive Order is NOT the same as US citizens, via Congress, granting to Donald Trump the authority to change the names of natural features bordering the United States, which is what I brought up.
Furthermore, has the UNGEGN approved this re-naming, since the countries of Mexico and Cuba also border on the Gulf of Mexico?
I don’t believe any rational person will accept that an EO from a President of the US has the force of international law, although DJT and his MAGA devotees certainly believe that to be so.
Really? Mt. Denali (Mt. McKinley) is totally contained within the US State of Alaska and does NOT have a border with any other nation. Geography 101.
BTW, you seem like the ideal person to confirm the recent rumor that President Trump will be renaming the Rocky Mountains to the “Great Donald J Trump Mountains” prior to leaving office January 2029. Please, is this true?
TDS is strong in you 🙂
Is that you, Yoda?
Ooops, I see from the down vote that I should have asked instead:
Is that you, Vader?
Hmmm . . . more down votes, I see.
Then, it must be you, OneBeGoneWannabe, my master! How’s that lightsaber thing working out between you and Emperor Palatable?
Ahem . . . you might notice that an Executive Order is NOT the same as US citizens, via Congress, granting to Donald Trump the authority to change the names of natural features bordering the United States, which is what I brought up.
I don’t know where you are from, perhaps a Communist dictatorship, or maybe you are a young product of the Government School System, but the US citizens did indeed grant Trump the authority to change the names – we call it “An Election”.
I know Constitutional Republics is an impossible concept for those with TDS to comprehend, just take it on faith that it is a thing.
Are you actually implying that the US election of a President grants to that person any power he/she desires to execute? Really???
If so, you should read—more importantly understand—the Tenth Amendment to the what most US citizens call the US Constitution, which states that any powers not specifically given to the federal government, nor withheld from the states, are reserved to those respective states, or to the people.
As a reductio ad absurdum example, does anyone really think President Trump has the power to declare that his wife Melania is to be the figure printed on all future $1 currency bills?
Your own statements invite me to inquire: “What school system are you the product of?”
I don’t know the answer but, what geographical features did “citizens via Congress” name?
I might be wrong but, weren’t most named by the discover? A French guy named The Grand Tetons. (I suspect he’d been in the wilderness quite a while to come up with that name!) 😎
Sometimes native American names were maintained. (Ohio River, Mississippi River, etc.)
Answers, just a few of many:
1) The name Mount McKinley was first given to North America’s highest peak by prospector William Andrews Dickey in 1896. He named it after then-presidential nominee William McKinley.
2) Dellenbaugh Butte explorer and artist Frederick Dellenbaugh was a member of John Wesley Powell’s expedition that charted the Green and Colorado Rivers. Dellenbaugh Butte in Utah was named by the expedition in his honor.
3) Perhaps the greatest example, John Wesley Powell is credited with naming the Grand Canyon, first using the term “Grand Canyon” in a report in 1871. He decided on the name to reflect the canyon’s grandeur. Before Powell’s expedition, the canyon had been called other names, including the “Big Canyon” and “The Mountain Lying Down” by the Paiute people.
3) Many geographical features were named by early American explorers, pioneers, and settlers. For example, members of the Lewis and Clark Expedition (1804–1806), all US citizens, named many rivers, mountains, and rock formations across the West which were subsequently officially recognized via Congressional proclamation.
Trump already had the authority to change the naming conventions on US government maps as Chief Executive. He doesn’t need new authorizations from Congress nor does he need UNGEGN approval. UNGEGN is a naming recommendations body and has no control over any name changes the US or any other nation decides to use on their own maps. Hense Falklands/Malvinas, Tibet/Xizang, Diomede Islands/Gvozdev Islands, East Sea/Sea of Japan,etc.
Then we all must look forward, with great joy, to the Rocky Mountains being renamed the Great Donald J. Trump Mountains before our current President leaves office in January 2029.
And will he please finally correct the name of our country to its proper geographical one: The United States of North America. ;-))
Who exactly is claiming it has the force of international law? What the USA calls things is irrelevant to what other countries call them. By your logic, we should always call Germany “Deutschland” and Spain “Espana.” Besides, “Gulf of America” is a much more geographically accurate name for a body of water that borders North, Central, and South America
My “logic” delineated the issues with renaming the “Gulf of Mexico” to the “Gulf of America” based on:
1) Mexico having a greater amount of coastland bordering the Gulf than does the US,
2) The correct name change, should it occur, would be the “Gulf of North America” since there is no continent named simply “America”, and
3) I never mentioned Trump renaming other countries or other world geographical features that did not border on the US. Reading comprehension 101.
I do believe both the International Hydrographic Organization (IHO), responsible for standardizing nautical charts and the names of maritime geographical features, and the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), which establishes names used on aviation navigation charts around the world, would take issue with your statement.
BTW, estimates for the cost (to US taxpayers, of course) to change the name of the Gulf of Mexico in just the US alone are $2–4 billion depending on the scale and speed of implementation
(ref: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-much-does-cost-rename-gulf-mexico-america-erich-r-b%C3%BChler-sv7hf ).
Of course Trump electing to do this solely on his own volition pretty much puts a lie behind his stated desire to “cut government costs”, let alone his feeble, short-lived fame with DOGE and dancing with Elon Musk.
Thanks for your response and clarification. My point was that some people faced real, life-threatening hardships like surviving a war in their country, being chased through jungles by communists trying to “reeducate” them and fleeing on unsafe boats to foreign countries to start new lives. To me that just kind of puts the petty argument about Gulf of America vs. Gulf of Mexico in a bit of a perspective, and calling the renaming of the gulf dictatorial is a bit over the top.
And likewise, thank you for a civil, well-argued reply. I agree totally with you about the real pettiness of this renaming of the Gulf of Mexico, hence my comments about the person who initiated it.
And, for clarification, I never said President Trump was a dictator, but instead only referred to him acting like one. Since that renaming was never put to US citizens for debate—let alone approval/disapproval—I stand by the reference.
You say potato 🥔 I say potato 🥔 let’s call the whole thing off 😂😂😂👍🎃🤦♂️
?
Calling the Gulf of America something other than the official name is rather childish.
You are also pig ignorant if you think that Gulf of Mexico is special and think that body of water had no other name:
Chalchiuhtlicueyecatl – Aztec name meaning “House of Chalchiuhtlicue,” after the goddess of water and seas.
Ilhuicaatl – Aztec term meaning “sky water,” reflecting their cosmological view.
Nahá – Mayan term meaning “great water.”
Mar del Norte (“Sea of the North”) – Used by Hernán Cortés in the 1500s.
Golfo de Florida – Spanish explorers’ name referencing the Florida coast.
Golfo de Cortés – Possibly named after Hernán Cortés.
Sinus S. Michaelis (“Gulf of St. Michael”) – Found on Latin maps.
Golfo de Iucatán / Mare Iuchatanicum – Referring to the Yucatán Peninsula.
Sinus Magnus Antillarum (“Great Antillean Gulf”) – A broader Caribbean designation.
Mare Cathaynum (“Cathayan Sea”) – A name reflecting early European misconceptions.
Golfo de Nueva España (“Gulf of New Spain”) – Reflecting Spanish colonial control.
Great Bay of Mexico / Great Gulf of Mexico – Found on English maps from the 1700s.
Seno Mexicano / Ensenada Mexicana – Spanish terms meaning “Mexican Sound” or “Mexican Cove.”
Why do you lose your mind when that body of water has its name changed yet again?
Duhhhhh . . . I NEVER implied or stated such. Reading comprehension 101.
Also, I don’t think the world has yet agreed that “its name has changed yet again”, but I would welcome an objective reference citation that that is true.
By the way with your reference to me being “pig ignorant”, thanks for confirming for all WUWT comment readers to see, the insightful wisdom of Socrates:
“When the debate is lost, slander becomes the tool of the loser.”
You might want to check out—or perhaps more appropriately, ignore—the International Hydrographic Organization (IHO), which is responsible for standardizing nautical charts and the names of maritime geographical features.
You may also choose dismiss the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), which establishes names used on aviation navigation charts.
To the best of my knowledge, both of these organizations are totally ignoring Donald Trump’s executive order for renaming the Gulf of Mexico.
And there is this, extracted today from Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of_Mexico_naming_controversy ):
“The United Kingdom declined to recognize any different name for the Gulf of Mexico, based on common usage across the English-speaking world.”
This is probably a dumb question but why is what The United Kingdom recognizes or not dispositive?
You are right.
The 1991-2020 average is 14.4±5.5 named storms, 7.2±3.3 hurricanes and 3.2±1.9 major hurricanes. Color me unimpressed by NOAA’s prediction. It is basically just the average for the Atlantic basin for the last 30 years. If storms follow a gaussian distribution, then 68% of the time, guessing the average will be correct. They need to significantly outperform the one standard deviation guess to demonstrate any predictive ability.
Loren, I couldn’t agree more.
My apologies to you (if applicable, and to other readers that may have seen this previous post of mine) but it bears repeating:
“This current miss, despite the two multimillion dollar-per-year Weather and Climate Operational Supercomputing System (WCOSS) supercomputers used by NOAA, each operating at 14.5 petaflops. (source: https://www.noaa.gov/news-release/noaa-completes-upgrade-to-weather-and-climate-supercomputer-system ).
“The current government contract award to General Dynamics Information Technology for the WCOSS supercomputers and their designs, deployments, and management is stated to be $505 million over a potential 10-year period. (ref: https://www.gdit.com/about-gdit/press-releases/noaa-awards-general-dynamics-high-performance-computing-contract ).
“Of course, the quality of the output from supercomputers modeling weather or “climate”, particularly tropical storms, is only as good as the “science” that goes into programming them and the “data” they are fed. In this case, it appears the NOAA supercomputer outputs are pretty much equivalent in uncertainty to just predicting the expected number of storms (in each category listed) using statistical analysis (the mean and 2-sigma statistics) of the last four years of tropical storm data.
“That is, the predictions might as well have been done using an Excel program on a $500 laptop computer.”
Or by a gal or guy with an abacus 😂😂😂😂
Perhaps if she/he is willing to spend many months obtaining a 2-sigma uncertainty range. Obtaining a one sigma-statistical variation for a set of data involves solving for the squares of the difference-from-the-mean of each data point and then one has to solve for the square root of the average of those squared differences.
Such would be very hard to do because an abacus does not have the equivalent of a memory function, to say nothing of not having square or square root functions (necessitating long mathematical algorithms using multiplication and division to achieve such). If that abacus operator had the ability to perfectly memorize a large string of numerical values that would help.
Brilliant
Hahaha is that a little TDS joke?
No.
The continent is called America, Said gulf is present in multiple countries of the continent, so the right designation is indeed Gulf of America.
Or explain why the old designation is correct without using historical arguments.
I’m pleased to explain it for you based on simple geography, no history needed:
Mexico has a little more than 2,046 miles of coastline on the Gulf of Mexico whereas the US has a little less than 1,632 miles of Gulf coastline. Cuba is estimated to have at most about 250 miles of coastline said to “officially” border the Gulf of Mexico, the uncertainty being how and where to distinguish Gulf coastline from Caribbean Sea coastline.
Also, there is NO convention or precedent that says large geographical features should be named after the continent on which they are located . . . here, just a few examples, none named after their continent(s):
— the Mediterranean Sea (bordered by 21 countries, too many to list here; located on the continents of Europe and Africa)
— the Bay of Bengal (bordered by India, Bangladesh, Myanmar and Sri Lanka)
— the Amazon River (passes through Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, Bolivia and Brazil)
— the Malay Archipelago (comprised of Brunei, East Timor, Indonesia, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines and Singapore)
— the Himalayas mountain range (within the countries of India, Nepal, China, Bhutan, Pakistan and Afghanistan
— the Sahara Desert (comprised of 11 countries in North Africa, too many to list here)
— the Rocky Mountains (extending through Canada and the US)
Also, you need to know that the Gulf of Mexico is located on the continent that is officially named and recognized as “North America” (there is also a continent officially named as “South America”) . . . consequently you should therefore revise your argument to be that “the right designation is indeed Gulf of North America”. On this topic, President Trump overlooks the fact that “America” is NOT a blanket name for the United States of America . . . why am I not surprised by this? . . . go MAGA!
Don’t worry. There will be more next year simply by the law of averages and the media click bait headlines will be “Huge exponential increase in Hurricanes due to…(guess what).”
According to NASA big Hurricanes have the power of 10000 nuclear bombs.
Yet they can not detect such a massive abudance of energy right in front of their noses before it begins,
but they can exactly tell that a 1/10000 atmospheric co2 increase will cause a 3 degree temperature increase in 50 years and that they can prove that co2 is behind the worsening of droughts and floods.
The moment people realize the impossibility of such “science” will be the moment the AGW hoax is finished.
Then people will also understand why the coastlines haven’t changed in 50 years.
“According to NASA big Hurricanes have the power of 10000 nuclear bombs.”
So few people, apparently including you, fail to realize that nuclear bombs, such as the 15 kiloton TNT-equivalent bomb detonated over Hiroshima, Japan, despite their impressive power, actually release relatively little total energy. For example the Hiroshima bomb produced the equivalent of about about 63 TJ of total energy, but this was released over the detonation period of about one microsecond (0.0036 hour). That equates to a power release of about 63 MW produced over a 1 second period. So, 10,000 nuclear bombs of this size would amount to about 630 GW of total power produced over a one second period, or about 0.175 GWh of energy production.
In comparison, a large 1 GW-rated commercial nuclear power plant today operating continuously at nameplate output level would generate that same amount of energy in about 0.175 hours = 11 minutes of steady-state operation.
For the sake of argument, lets assume the NASA reference was to 10,000 nuclear fusion bombs each at an average rating of 2 megatons TNT equivalent. That’s a 133:1 scale up, so in this case a single modern nuclear power plant would need to operate 133 * 11 = 1470 minutes, or about 24 hours steady state to equal that.
Thanks for the lecture but many people, including you fail to understand the main topic.
Wether you find the energy level of 110000 minutes released by a nuclear power plant impressive or not is not the problem.(it should be enough to easily reduce human population by 99%)
The problem only becomes one when you claim
that you pretend to be able to predict any outcome by an irrelevant increase of 1/10000. of co2 while you can’t
predict an event with the energy level of the entire global nuclear weapon arsenal.
Or to say it simply: If you can not see the elephant in the room,
don’t claim that you can see the mosquito hiding behind the elephant.
You simply can not.
“The problem only becomes one when you claim that you pretend to be able to predict any outcome by an irrelevant increase of 1/10000. of co2 while you can’t predict an event with the energy level of the entire global nuclear weapon arsenal.”
With the best I can do to decipher that mash-up of English language,
I simply never claimed any of what you assert.
Reading comprehension 101.
Errrrr . . . 110,000 minutes = 76 days. Not sure where you dug that up.
The really funny part is that the forecasters think they understand weather and climate and what makes it all work well enough, that they can make valid predictions a whole season ahead of systems that are by their nature chaotic. Heck, where I live they often can’t get the weather right even just one day in advance!
“Heck, where I live they often can’t get the weather right even just one day in advance!”
But they can predict the weather 80 years in advance with 97% accuracy !!
(:-))
Where I live (in the Midwest USA), sometimes they get the precipitation forecast wrong on the day of the forecast.
Rule No. 1 in weather forecasting: look out the window.
Heard on a Boston radio station one snowy Christmas morning many, many years ago. “I have here the latest weather forecast from the US Weather Service. But it doesn’t seem to have any relation to what’s happening outside, so I won’t bother to read it.”
That’s chaos for you. The wrong butterflies flapped their wings in the wrong places.
We should be thankful that a buffalo didn’t “fart” in the wrong direction way back when!
(We might all welcome a new ice age!)
UAH shows that basically ALL the warming has come at El Nino events.
There is not one model that can predict El Nino events.
That makes them totally useless for anything real. !
Maybe they’re actually occurring but people are too preoccupied with other climate disasters to notice. Or maybe it’s another example of weather and climate fluctuations, as has been the case in the past, and these variations are just business as usual. Mind you, this lapse in hurricane activity won’t cause the alarmists to abandon their warnings of impending doomsdays due to carbon emissions.
Twice so far this season they have given storms an eighty percent chance or more of becoming hurricanes that failed to develop. I look at three things on the web: wind and dust at 850mb, wind sheer, and ocean temps. Both times I just didn’t see their predictions being justified. Dust and wind sheer were very unfavorable. They need to reduce their climate change bias for more hurricanes in their models.
The IPCC version of Climate change has the poles warming the most and the equator the least, maybe the one part of the theory that makes sense. As currents, be they in water or air as winds, are driven by temperature variation then when you reduce the temp difference between the poles and the equator what do you think is going to happen to the intensity and frequency of hurricanes.
A colder world is a lot more frightening than a warm world.
I am still awaiting that predicted 0.3 hurricane.
It is on my bucket list.