Wrong, TIME, One Nor’easter Isn’t Proof of Climate Change

In their article How Does Climate Change Impact Nor’easters? TIME magazine claims that a nor’easter which struck the northeastern United States in mid-September illustrates how climate change is making powerful storms more intense. That’s false. There is no evidence that the recent nor’easter was at all unusual or represents a long-term climate change induced shift in the occurrence or strength of such storms. TIME’s claims go well beyond what the evidence can establish about an individual storm and lacks support in data and meteorological records.

“While September nor’easters aren’t unheard of, they are uncommon,” states TIME. “And as the climate warms, research suggests that the strongest storms are also going to become more intense.” TIME then uses speculative sleight of hand to link the recent storm to increasing number of billion-dollar disasters.

The historical record and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) show substantial natural variability in extratropical storms and low confidence in observed trends in their intensity, making TIME’s attempt to turn a single weather event into a climate-change story scientifically unjustified.

The basic problem with TIME’s article is right there in its premise. A nor’easter is a weather event. Climate is the statistical behavior of weather measured over decades.

As Climate at a Glance has explained, individual hurricanes, floods, droughts, heat waves, cold snaps, and storms are weather. Long-term changes in their frequency or intensity can potentially constitute evidence of climate change, but one storm cannot establish such a trend. See the graphic below from the European Space Agency to visualize this.

That distinction is fundamental to climate science, yet it increasingly disappears when a dramatic weather event presents an opportunity for a climate headline.

TIME reports that this particular nor’easter produced heavy rain, flooding, winds exceeding 60 mph, and coastal flooding in New Jersey. Those facts establish that a strong storm occurred. They do not establish why it occurred, much less demonstrate that human greenhouse gas emissions made it unusually powerful.

TIME even acknowledges that nor’easters are nothing new. The article notes famous storms including the New England Blizzard of 1978, the 1993 “Superstorm,” and the severe Boston snowstorms of 2015. Let’s not forget the Great Blizzard of 1888. Nor’easters are a normal feature of East Coast weather and have battered the region throughout its recorded history.

More revealing is an admission buried halfway through the article: “Scientists are still not 100 percent clear about how nor’easters are changing due to climate change.”

That should have been the beginning of TIME’s analysis, not a caveat quickly brushed aside before returning to claims of worsening storms.

The IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report on climate change provides no findings that extreme weather events, such as nor’easters, are increasing in number of intensity.

Nor’easters are extratropical cyclones, and Chapter 11 of IPCC AR6 specifically examines these storms. The IPCC reports “low confidence in past changes of maximum wind speeds and other measures of dynamical intensity of extratropical cyclones.”

This is true for many weather events, as seen in the table below.

Table. Summary table showing lack of weather event attribution from Chapter 11 of the IPCC AR6 report.

The IPCC also finds that there is low confidence in past-century trends in the number and intensity of the strongest Northern Hemisphere extratropical cyclones because of large year-to-year and decadal variability and limitations in the historical data.

Even more directly, the IPCC states that studies attributing changes in the most extreme extratropical cyclones are not available and that there is “overall low confidence” in attributing changes in individual extreme extratropical cyclone events to human influence.

Somehow, TIME missed the IPCC’s conclusion on this topic.

TIME blurs those two very different propositions.

Dollar losses are not a physical measurement of storm intensity. A storm striking today’s heavily developed East Coast encounters vastly more homes, businesses, roads, vehicles, utilities, and expensive infrastructure than the same storm would have encountered decades ago. Inflation alone also increases nominal losses. Increasing billion-dollar disaster counts do not, therefore, demonstrate that storms have become meteorologically more severe.

Climate Realism has repeatedly addressed this error in media reporting: increasing economic exposure and wealth can increase disaster losses even without a corresponding increase in the underlying weather hazard.

There is an additional irony in TIME publishing this story in September 2026.

While TIME cites a single nor’easter to suggest that storms are intensifying, the Atlantic tropical basin has been experiencing an extraordinary lack of hurricanes.

As of September 21, the Atlantic had produced six named tropical storms but not a single hurricane. It was the first time since 1914, 112 years ago, that the basin had gone that far into the official Hurricane season without producing one. The climatological peak of Atlantic hurricane activity occurs around September 10, so this historic quiet occurred during what normally is the busiest part of the season.

NOAA National Hurricane Center records confirm the unusually weak activity, with the storms through mid-September remaining below hurricane strength. A strengthening El Niño and associated wind shear have been identified as important factors suppressing Atlantic hurricane development this year.

Does that remarkably quiet hurricane season prove climate change has stopped affecting storms? Of course not. It’s weather. And that is precisely the point.

A quiet Atlantic hurricane season cannot disprove long-term climate change, just as one powerful September nor’easter cannot prove that climate change is making storms worse. Climate trends require decades of data, not whichever storm happens to dominate this week’s headlines.

Indeed, TIME’s own expert undermines the article’s framing. Professor Mathew Barlow acknowledges that researchers are “not seeing any changes in the overall average” number of nor’easters and that the total number of storms “might actually be going down a little bit.”

That admission deserves considerably more attention than TIME gives it.

TIME starts with a storm, asks how climate change made it worse, and then assembles quotations supporting that premise while relegating contradictory evidence to a few sentences. That’s not how climate science is supposed to work. Nor is it how science journalism should work.

A nor’easter struck the Northeast. It produced heavy rain, strong winds, flooding, and disruption, all facts making the storm worthy of significant news coverage. But, there is no evidence whatsoever that climate change had any influence on the recent nor’easter. Since neither data nor historical records suggest any significant changes in the formation or behavior or nor’easters, TIME should make no such connection to climate change. The story goes beyond the news to disaster story telling. Based on this report, perhaps it would be more accurate to file TIME on the fiction rack at bookstores and newsstands.

Anthony Watts

Anthony Watts is a senior fellow for environment and climate at The Heartland Institute. Watts has been in the weather business both in front of, and behind the camera as an on-air television meteorologist since 1978, and currently does daily radio forecasts. He has created weather graphics presentation systems for television, specialized weather instrumentation, as well as co-authored peer-reviewed papers on climate issues. He operates the most viewed website in the world on climate, the award-winning website wattsupwiththat.com.

Originally posted at ClimateREALISM