CBS Gets the Facts Wrong About Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Trends
A recent broadcast weather segment on CBS News, Los Angeles, titled “Helene gaining strength from climate change effects,” features a staff meteorologist claiming that hurricane Helene was strengthened by climate change, and that indeed hurricanes in general are increasing in intensity and power. This is false. It is actually shocking how wrong CBS is with regards to what actual hurricane data show, which is that hurricanes are not getting more intense, frequent, or powerful.
The CBS video description reads “…Helene is gaining strength from warmer waters in the Gulf of Mexico, an effect linked to climate change that appears to make hurricanes and storms more powerful.”
The CBS anchor hands the segment over to meteorologist Marina Jurica, who alleges that “the increasing intensity of hurricanes is basically rooted in physics… hurricanes draw energy from that warm ocean water and as that climate change causes sea surface temperatures to rise the energy available for these storms increases.”
It is true that warm sea surface temperatures contribute to hurricane formation, However, they are far from the only element, and in fact for most of this hurricane season, despite warmer-than-average sea surface temperatures, storms struggled to form at all.
Jurica asserts the usual claim that warm water causes stronger winds and more moisture which causes heavier rainfall, “one of the most significant effects of climate change is its impact on hurricane intensity… which is why we’re seeing more catastrophic flooding associated with all of these recent storms.” The anchor went on to assert that hurricanes have been more intense in recent years and “the level of the storms is rising,” and Jurica added that “over the last several decades storms are moving slower” using Harvey as an example of this effect. Most of these claims are made out of whole cloth, complete nonsense.
Starting with the Hurricane Harvey anecdote, when the storm hit Texas in 2017, it was the first major hurricane to make landfall in the United States since 2005, after a 12-year major hurricane drought in one of the most active tropical storm regions in the world. The longest such major hurricane drought since records have been kept in the United States.
Jurica claims in the CBS clip that Harvey was stalled and dumped more water on Texas because of global warming causing more moisture in the air, and while it is true that the precipitation was unprecedented for the area, reality shows that it was cooler-than-normal trough that stalled the storm out over Houston. Stalled storms are not new, as pointed out by professional meteorologist and hurricane-historian Joe Bastardi here. As a meteorologist herself it was Jurica’s job to look this up before going on live television.
No measured hurricane data supports the claim that hurricanes have been becoming more intense. This is only found flawed computer model outputs.
Publicly available data record no trend in increasing frequency or intensity of tropical cyclones in the Atlantic or elsewhere around the globe. Accumulated Cyclone Energy is a metric used to track the overall strength of tropical cyclones over time, and if anything, the data here presented by Dr. Ryan Maue suggest they have been getting less powerful since the 1990s. (See figure below)
Even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) agrees, stating that there is “only low confidence for the attribution of any detectable changes in tropical cyclone activity to anthropogenic influences.”
The CBS broadcast was before Helene made landfall, and while hurricane Helene proved to be very destructive, it is not unprecedented. Past hurricanes have likewise caused significant flooding and wind and tornado damage well inland in the Appalachians and surrounding regions, such as hurricane Gracie in 1959 which made landfall in South Carolina as a Category 4, during which 13 people died in Virginia due to tornados. There are many other examples, the most damaging of which was the Great Galveston Hurricane of 1900, a category 4 storm which took between 6,000 and 12,000 lives, most due to storm surge and flooding.
Every major storm involving loss of life and property is a tragedy, and they need to be taken seriously, which is why it is so appalling when the mainstream media takes advantage of peoples’ fear preceding dangerous storms, and their losses and misery following them, in order to make false claims about climate change. CBS’s meteorologist is either shockingly poorly informed about hurricane data or just doesn’t care about facts, despite her training as a meteorologist.