Roger Pielke Jr. marks the end of the 2025 hurricane season with a writeup and review. As we so often say, if it had gone the other way the climate crowd would have blamed greenhouse gases. But a quiet hurricane season is just weather. This time though the trouble goes deeper. Climate modelers don’t mind the idea that there may be fewer hurricanes in a warmer world, but they say that on average each one will be even stronger. So the energy per hurricane should be trending up even if the number of hurricanes is going down. Yeah, coulda woulda shoulda. But guess what.
The measurement of which we speak is ACE: Accumulated Cyclone Energy. Pielke Jr. plots the global ACE Index divided by the annual global hurricane count since 1980 as follows:
There is no upward trend, and in fact the highest values were in the1990s. Another way of measuring the climate breakdown thingy is adding up the total ACE per year. And behold:
Once again no trends, and the largest values were last century. Almost exactly as if the weather were not getting worse, contrary to what everybody knows or at least everybody who’s anybody thinks they know, and says they know, but does not check.
Hurricanes did hit the Caribbean, most notably Melissa which killed 100 people. But as for hurricanes hitting the U.S., 2025 was very disappointing, for those who find the absence of death and devastation a letdown. Here is the chart of major hurricane U.S. landfalls:
On which please note the 11-year blank beginning in 2006. After hurricane Katrina in 2005 led to endless predictions that this was the “new normal”, nature begged to differ, at some length.
So that was the year that was, or wasn’t. No word from the World Weather Attribution crowd whether they will attribute the lack of extreme events to greenhouse gases. But we know they won’t. They only ever look at bad weather events, so the fact that they only ever find CO2 causes bad weather is built into the method. And for those who were hoping for a good old-fashioned catastrophe, cheer up, there’s always next year.
John,
Your comment "cheer up, there's always next year" made me laugh and brought to memory a line from Beyond the Fringe. A group of doom sayers are in a mountain cave calling upon the end of the world, when, of course, it doesn't happen, the leader of this hapless group intones, "never mind lads, there's always next week"