Hurricanes and Other Evil Winds

As Hurricane Beryl barreled its way across the Gulf of Mexico and into the US mainland, the attention-getting headlines had beaten it there by a long shot — claims that it was a remarkable outlier were appearing in climate-frantic narratives more than a week earlier. CBS News claimed it was “historic,” alongside headlines on “How to talk to your kids about climate anxiety.” The BBC reported  that it was “the first hurricane to reach the category four level in June since NHC [National Hurricane Center] records began and the earliest to hit category five – the highest category – in July.” While technically true, and warranting some mention, the claims tend to misrepresent, by implication and association, the current scientific understanding of hurricanes and human impacts on climate change.

The scientific consensus on hurricanes, a consensus not covered by breathless reporting on climate, is that humans have had no detectable impact on hurricanes over the past century. The National Climate Assessment published by the U.S. Global Change Research Program, for instance, in Appendix 3 reads:

There has been no significant trend in the global number of tropical cyclones nor has any trend been identified in the number of US land-falling hurricanes.

So what’s actually going on? Is Beryl’s historic early arrival an indication of something fundamentally different about hurricane activity? Does it or does it not represent the bitter fruit of humanity’s ecological sins? The answer is almost certainly not. Rather, the hype around Beryl’s early arrival represents a major misunderstanding, a mass-bias phenomenon which sees evidence where evidence doesn’t really exist.

Historically speaking, of course, hurricanes are commonplace in the Gulf. “Hurricane” derives from the prehistoric Taíno name for the god of evil winds, Jurucán. The Spanish quickly adopted the name to describe the violent storms which wreaked such havoc on their exploratory efforts in the New World. Both the 1527 Narváez and 1539 De Soto expeditions, for example, were pummeled by hurricanes that may well have reached category five, had the NHC been around to classify them as such. So while it is conceivable that Beryl is a major anomaly and portent of evil tidings, it is very unlikely to be.

Instead, its media portrayal as Exhibit A in the case for anthropogenic climate change is fundamentally inaccurate. Today’s dire headlines are a perfect example of what Steve Koonin, in his book Unsettled, calls “the long game of telephone that starts with the research literature and runs through the [scientific] assessment reports to the summaries of the assessment reports and on to the media coverage.” The media, he says, often end up distributing a narrative that is directly counter to the actual evidence. They do this partly from misunderstanding the scientific and statistical significance of observations, but mostly because extreme headlines fit a generally understood narrative. Such reports are far more likely to be recognized and absorbed by the news-reading public. This selective attention pushes a bias toward extremism in climate reporting that significantly inflames the political climate, to our collective detriment.

Not widely reported, for instance, are counter-narrative facts such as that since 2011, major hurricane counts have dropped below their 170-year average. Or the fact that the Great Barrier Reef, once a poster-child of climate doom, has now hit record levels of coral cover. It doesn’t take a great deal of imagination to picture what the headlines would read if these positive facts were reversed: “Major Hurricanes: Highest Number in Centuries!” or “Barrier Reef Records Lowest Coverage in Recorded History.” These are headlines we can easily envision, but have not seen, because they are entirely backward. 

Instead, what happens is that reports which are technically true (like Beryl’s record early arrival) make it into the common current only if they fit the general alarmist narrative. The BBC perfectly exemplifies this in its coverage, noting that “Hurricane Beryl’s record-breaking nature has put the role of climate change in the spotlight.” It then goes on to say, toward the end of an article most people will never fully read:

The causes of individual storms are complex, making it difficult to fully attribute specific cases to climate change. But exceptionally high sea surface temperatures are seen as a key reason why Hurricane Beryl has been so powerful.

This is how the slight-of-hand works: BBC reporters, no doubt in interviews with hurricane experts, were obliged to quibble somewhat about the implications of Beryl’s record-setting classification. They properly note that it is “difficult” (impossible, in fact) to attribute Beryl’s record to climate change as such. And they are correct that high sea surface temperatures are a major factor in Beryl’s extraordinary rise. But it is the way these technical truths are presented that leads to errors in association. Very few casual readers would be likely to read the article, headlined with “How record-breaking Hurricane Beryl is a sign of a warming world” and not make an inductive leap to the causal inference of human-induced warming. This is a problem, because such an inference is in fact not substantiated by any scientifically accepted observations.

Now, to be sure, this works both ways. This is not a claim that human emissions have no impacts, after all, only that we must be very careful about what the evidence actually says before channeling it into policy recommendations. Nor is my point that we can safely disregard all negative reports about the environment, since there are clearly issues that warrant our genuine collective attention. For instance, I’ve played a bit of sleight-of-hand myself: I correctly noted that major hurricanes are below the historical average, but I did not highlight the fact that overall hurricane count is up. Likewise with the Great Barrier Reef: while coral coverage is remarkably up, the kind of monoculture coral crop accounting for the rise still leaves room for ecological concern.

The real point is that we must demand honesty, including contextual complexity, on climate reporting. Especially since the stakes are so high (either in matters of our environment or individual liberty), we cannot afford to play games with half-truths and obfuscations. Intelligent free people deserve fuller, more comprehensive, less-activist reporting on climate change. Beryl has made a record of sorts, yes. What that record really means in the context of human-induced climate change is fundamentally, scientifically unknown. Maybe that would be a better headline.