Via Roger Pielke Jr. we have learned of a new comprehensive assessment of extreme weather trends published in The European Physical Journal Plus. The authors go systematically through the major categories of extreme weather events and, as we’ve come to expect, fail to find anything alarming to talk about. Which we think is worth talking about because it runs so counter to conventional wisdom. We start this week with hurricanes, about which the authors note that, because of their potential for causing enormous amounts of damage, they grab a lot of attention and play a central role in debates about climate change policy. But to date “global observations do not show any significant trends in both the number and the energy accumulated by hurricanes, as shown in Fig. 1 and as claimed in several specific papers for the USA, which report the trend dating back to over 160 years ago, or for other regions of the globe.”

The top chart shows global tropical cyclone frequency and the bottom shows Global and Northern Hemisphere Accumulated Cyclone Energy, both since the early 1970s. Nothing to see here folks, move along.