Experts Warn Hurricane In Hurricane Alley During Hurricane Season Clear Sign Of Climate Change
It hits the mark in one sense but kind of misses the big picture. If you want to confound the political wing of the alarmists, tell them this:
Hurricane Ernesto (CAT 2 in August) had twice the impact at substantiating the global warming hypothesis than did Hurricane Helene (CAT 4 in September)
It'll make them apoplectic because they'd rather use the sexy stats of death and destruction than what the hypothesis is really about. The stats they broadcast are:
Ernesto Stats:
- CAT 2
- Max Wind: 100 mph
- Destruction: $24.3 million
- Deaths: 3 (they went swimming and got caught in rip tides)
Helene Stats:
- CAT 4
- Max Wind: 140 mph
- Destruction: >$20 billion (almost 1,000 times that of Ernesto)
- Deaths: 52 (Primarily drownings from storm surge and inland flooding)
But here's why Ernesto bolsters the hypothesis better. The climate warming hypothesis, with respect to cyclones, is that increasing the potential energy of the ocean (by heating it) will result in a greater transformation of that potential energy into the kinetic energy of cyclones. There’s a metric for that kinetic energy called Accumulated Cyclone Energy (ACE) which you can read about
here. It’s used by all the cyclone tracking centers (like
these with the University of Colorado Atmospheric Science Department) but you never hear it on the news. From
that Colorado webpage you can see that ACE for Ernesto was 14.4 versus 7.1 for Helene. Truthfully though, it’s the ACE for an entire hurricane season that’s most relevant for the hypothesis (rather than for individual storms), though Ernesto did contribute twice as much towards the 2024 season total than did Helene.
Almost forgot - scroll down that
Wikipedia webpage for ACE and you'll see what the top ten Atlantic hurricane seasons were according to that ACE measure (only three are in the 21st century).
