Nobody seems to think a bit of warming is a big problem, especially after the November we've been having. So, not surprisingly, the alarmists tell us the real problem is extreme weather, which they claim to prove by pointing to whichever hurricane just happened. Obviously hurricanes have been happening since long before the SUV or even Model T. But wait. Maybe rising greenhouse gases translate into more or worse hurricanes. If so shouldn’t somebody somewhere show the graph? Now courtesy of CO2science.org, we learn that someone has. Oops. It shows the frequency and intensity of landfalling hurricanes along the US coast has not changed since 1900. Don’t call 911. There’s no emergency.
The authors of the underlying study, to measure whether there’s been an increase in the overall severity of storms, constructed an index called Accumulated Cyclone Energy, which integrates frequency and power of tropical cyclones making landfall along the eastern US. They call this measure "ISAAC", which stands for Integrated Storm Activity Annually over the Continental U.S.
They further point out that the nearly 12-year stretch from 2005 to 2017 was by far the longest interval in US history without a Category 3 or higher hurricane making landfall, twice as long as the second-longest stretch. Of course that didn't stop alarmists who a few years earlier were saying global warming weakened hurricanes due to “wind shear” from turning around in 2017 and declaring that climate change meant the US is in for more and stronger hurricanes and cyclones because I mean look Hurricane Irma. But if you look, the record showed the opposite was happening.
Observing historically low rates of hurricane formation is no obstacle to declaring a crisis of global warming-induced hurricane formation, at least for alarmists. As the saying goes, never let the absence of a crisis go to waste.