Hurricane Season Again – I wish it was November

I wish it was November, so we’d be past the hurricane season.

But wait, no, November is voting month which I’m dreading. And November is during fall/winter during the year of the pandemic.

Maybe I want it to be December…I don’t know. I do want to be past the hurricane season.

Can I do the Rip Van Wrinkle and sleep through the season?

I’m tired, I could not sleep this past week and I see that there are two disturbances churning off the coast of Africa. More storms. More anxiety. More sleeplessness.

I remember I collected hurricane data last year to see if I could see signs of climate change. I vaguely remembered that I really couldn’t see evidence of climate change, but I dug out the data to revisit it.

Hurricane Graphs

Source: Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_hurricanes

Count of hurricanes:

Count of cat 1, 2 and 3 hurricanes:

Count of cat 4 and 5 hurricanes:

Yep, I can’t see any signs of climate change in the hurricane data. The overall count doesn’t seem to be increasing nor does the count of cat 3, 4, or 5 seems to be increasing. I just can’t see it at all. As a matter of fact, the overall count seems to be decreasing ever just so slightly.

Huh? The last cat 3 was in 2005? Cat 4 and 5 seemed to have been more frequent before 1961. And since 2005, it seems like there’s been a slight decrease, with most hurricanes being category 1 or 2.

And yet…the hurricanes seem to be getting worse.

Why this disconnect? Just in the last 3 or 4 years, they’ve been horrifying – or at least they appear so: we’ve had the world shattering flooding from Harvey in 2017, we’ve had multiple cat 3 and 4s hitting the Caribbean in 2017 or 2018, cat 4 hitting Florida in 2017, cat 5 again in Florida in 2018, and a cat 5 hovering over the Bahamas for two or three days last year. Maybe it’s because we can get news ‘round the clock. Or maybe Katrina in 2005 subtly changed my perception. Or maybe it’s not the frequency of the hurricanes but the severity of the storm surge and flooding that I now see in the news.

The August 27th hurricane Laura was a cat 4. One blessing, if there is any, is that it went by fast rather than sticking around to flood the landfall area.

When I gather data from NOAA which encompasses tropical storms, not just hurricanes hitting the U.S. shores, I can see that the number of storms have been increasing.

NOAA data of all tropical storms, including those that do not hit U.S. shores:

Source: Wikipedia https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/data/

There are other data pertaining to temperatures that shows climate change happening.

Average of annual state temperatures:

Source: NOAA https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cag/statewide/mapping

Sea surface temperatures:

Source: EPA.GOV https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indicators-sea-surface-temperature

Ocean heat:

Source: EPA.GOV https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indicators-ocean-heat

All of these charts show increasing temperatures, so yes, there is some type of climate change going on. The evidence for climate change does not appear to show up in the hurricane data, at least not in the obvious way, so maybe that is why scientists say that they can’t tie evidence of climate change to a specific hurricane because they can’t see it in the data. Maybe they just feel it and just see it in the temperatures, especially in the ocean heat, which logically, should mean increased number of hurricanes or at least more severe storms.

Now, I’m going to go to sleep. I’m just tired.