In a remarkable burst of irresponsible ignorance, a leading Canadian bank just warned major investment clients that a great wind will soon blow away their money. In a report Focus on Hurricanes Scotiabank, in its “CAPITAL THAT WORKS” “Focus On Series”, said “An Above-Normal Season Is on the Way – Equity Performance and Sector/Company Exposure”. It then went on to make a series of pronouncements that read like Suzuki Foundation propaganda. Which is all PR fun and games until somebody loses a portfolio. So we humbly suggest that their long green analysts spend less time over at the Greenpeace site and more at ours.

The key offending passage read:

“Hurricane activity in the Gulf of America/Gulf of Mexico (and off Mexico’s west coast) is perhaps the most important natural disaster risk for investors focused on the region. Not only does the risk last six months each year, but the frequency and intensity of these storms are increasing due to climate change. The impact on economic activity, sectors/industries, and, of course, equities, can be profound. Unsurprisingly, property and casualty insurers stand to face higher claims due to hurricane activity, while construction and home builders typically experience a surge in new business. For commodity producers with plants or mines in the region, the impact can be hit or miss. This year, the NOAA has placed a 60% probability on an above-normal hurricane season (here). This means we can expect 13 to 19 named storms and six to 10 hurricanes, of which three to five are likely to be major (Category 3+).”

You might suppose that before writing such a thing they would at least have taken a quick look at, oh, we don’t know, the actual tally of hurricanes thus far as opposed to some bureaucrat’s prediction. And if they had, including checking CDN before believing alarmist propaganda, they’d know we’ve had the quietest start since 1970. The kind of real-world information a real-world investor might reasonably desire and, moreover, expect you to provide.

Before we even get to the climate science, we need to talk about the economics, the sort of thing a naïve observer might imagine Scotiabank specialised in. As Roger Pielke Jr. and others have catalogued in detail, damage from natural disasters is not getting worse and therefore it cannot be getting worse because of climate change or anything else including toe of frog.

It is getting more expensive, because there are more people in the world and they are richer. But someone losing $2,000 out of $100,000 is not more severely afflicted than someone losing $1,000 out of $10,000 so the appropriate measure is losses as a share of global GDP. And speaking of Pielke, whose relentless data- and statistical-analysis-driven critiques helped put NOAA’s lurid “billion-dollar disaster” clickbait out of climate-alarmist business as a parody of bad statistical practice, his correction of their chart to include growth in GDP shows a downward slope in the U.S. since 1980. But even the original shows tropical cyclones as a separate category that is not increasing.

It’s not rocket surgery. But it has real-world consequences including financial ones. As the Manhattan Contrarian advises, and maybe he should be an investment banker:

“How quickly things change. It was only two years ago, in 2023, that I was writing posts compiling long lists of quotes from climate activists warning that all assets used for production of coal, oil and gas were about to become obsolete and ‘stranded.’ After all, wind and solar were (supposedly) cheaper and cleaner for generating electricity, which could then power anything and everything. Therefore anyone stupid enough to make further investments in producing fossil fuels would lose everything If you look today, you can still find predictions in 2025 that fossil fuel assets will shortly become ‘stranded.’ (Here is one from Bloomberg from March 6: ‘Investors Risk $2.3 Trillion of Stranded Fossil Fuel Assets.’). But such predictions are becoming fewer and fewer. Instead, what looks far more likely is that large portions, if not the entire business, of ‘renewable’ electricity generation from wind and sun is likely to get ‘stranded.’”

The reason is that they depend massively on subsidies and as the price of electricity rises relentlessly due to green dreams, the public is turning toward parties, including Reform in the UK, that are threatening to end them, as Donald Trump and the Republicans in the U.S. are trying to do with cascading consequences for those who thought they’d flow forever.

Oh dear. Someone’s going to lose their shirt, pants, shoes and socks and walk out in a barrel and they may be annoyed. Including with anyone who gave them massively bad investment advice based on green dreams not green eyeshades.

If someone’s waving their hands going “What about the human cost?”, well, OK, the Manhattan Contrarian also just wrote that “New Record Set For Deaths From Climate And Weather Disasters”. But before you put that in your report and smoke it:

“During the first half of 2025, a new record was set for the number of deaths caused by climate and weather disasters. Can you guess what that record was? If you read left-wing media sources, and believe anything they say, you might think that the recent record has something to do with a large and growing number of deaths. Recent articles in sources like CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times, and CBS News all explicitly claim that climate change is making weather events “deadlier,” or leading to increasing numbers of deaths, or some variation of that same message. I’m sure if you checked thirty such ‘mainstream’ news sources over the past year, all thirty of them would have pieces parroting that same narrative. Therefore you might be surprised by the actual record that has been set: The first half of 2025 (January to June) has seen the fewest number of deaths from climate and weather disasters of any first half year this century.”

And BTW in a piece of cunning foreshadowing, we note that his source was “Roger Pielke, Jr.’s Honest Broker Substack”. More on which later.

First, in case you download the Scotiabank report now, it seems that in response to an indignant complaint, not from us, they added the anodyne “though there is debate within the scientific community” at the end of the second sentence, after “climate change.” But it’s too little, too late, especially as that feeble patch linked to an MIT Technology Review item that was almost as useless as the original passage, saying:

“It’s now possible to link climate change to all kinds of extreme weather, from droughts to flooding to wildfires. Hurricanes are no exception – scientists have found that warming temperatures are causing stronger and less predictable storms. That’s a worry, because hurricanes are already among the most deadly and destructive extreme weather events around the world. In the US alone, three hurricanes each caused over $1 billion in damages in 2022. In a warming world, we can expect the totals to rise. But the relationship between climate change and hurricanes is more complicated than most people realize.”

Yeah. Just as the dreaded “attribution science” presumably referred to in the first sentence is simpler: it attributes everything to climate change. In this case, as the MIT piece eventually stammers:

“It might seem that there are far more storms than in the past, but we don’t really know for sure. That’s because historical records are limited, with little reliable data more than a few decades old, says Kerry Emanuel, professor emeritus in atmospheric science at MIT. So it’s tough to draw conclusions about how the frequency of tropical cyclones (the umbrella term for storms that are called hurricanes, cyclones, or typhoons, depending on the region) is changing over time. ... Some climate models suggest that climate change will increase the total number of storms that form, while others suggest the opposite, says Karthik Balaguru, a climate and data scientist at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.”

So the models disagree and the data is unclear. Mostly. What’s not unclear is that in recent years, as Scotiabank would know if they spent more time with the Climate Discussion Nexus and less with the watermelons, there has been no increase in the number of cyclones worldwide or in their ferocity. The latter, measured as “Accumulated Cyclone Energy” or ACE, is important because obviously if there were 10% fewer storms but they were on average 30% stronger it would be fair to say they are getting worse. There aren’t.

The people at Scotiabank, assuming they care about their large institutional investors with their huge portfolios on which a great many normal people depend, might also reasonably have looked into the question of whether the usual suspects predict a higher-than-normal hurricane season every spring. Which they certainly seem to. And while we’re all for archival spelunking, it wasn’t needed here. It happened in 2024, which isn’t really that long ago now. Nor is 2023, when it also happened. And by “it” we don’t just mean a quiet season. We mean a quiet season after loud predictions.

Of course as with everything, half of seasons are below average. And now, with a hat tip to the late Donald Rumsfeld and his unknown unknowns, we have to produce a firm, even apodictic piece of ignorance.

The data on number of tropical cyclones and ACE that we just cited, with charts in our original 2023 post, covers 1970 to 2022. Which might seem fairly conclusive and on many topics would be. Unfortunately it is a statistically sound principle that the more natural variability there is in any given phenomenon the longer the time series you need to determine whether you are seeing a trend “signal” emerging from the background “noise”. And as we wrote way back in 2024, in July, the accurate tally of Atlantic hurricanes we possess over the last century or so (since regular surveillance flights in the mid-1930s, then satellite records from the late 1970s) tell us that… there’s a lot of natural variability.

Both the total number and the number of majors jumps around, year to year and decade to decade, in ways that tell you these numbers jump around. Alarmists may toss around terms like “thousand-year event” but unless you have dependable records going back thousands of years, it’s just blather. And we won’t know whether any reliably observed pattern of hurricanes in the past 50 years shows a trend, in any direction, until we have hundreds or possibly thousands of years of records. No matter how much we wish we did for investing or indeed polemical purposes.

In the absence of data, we may want to rely on whatever is out there for at least a rough estimate. And again if Scotiabank did want to spelunk, well, they only had to subscribe to our free newsletter, in which we dug up anecdotal evidence of horrendous hurricanes going back hundreds of years. Obviously nobody wants to get hit by a hurricane. But if the best available advice is they’re hard to predict and hit hard when they arrive so dig a deep foundation, say so. Don’t curry favour with implacable enemies by misleading well-meaning friends or well-paying clients.

You get the idea. There was nothing hard about discovering that their considered advice to customers, who might well have made consequential decisions based on it, was superficial and misleading. Really, guys and gals. You need to get our newsletter. Maybe even send us a donation instead of throwing cash at trendy anti-capitalist causes who mislead you and your clients and cannot be appeased with kind words or cold cash.

Seriously. Here’s the link. You’re welcome.

P.S. It might help Scotiabank consider its green appeasement strategy to reflect that, the Financial Times reports, “Shell and other leading energy groups have abandoned a six-year-long attempt to define a “net zero” emissions strategy after being told that such a standard would require them to stop developing new oil and gasfields, according to documents seen by the Financial Times.” You’re not activists. You’re dealing in real-world decisions with real-world consequences.