Issues & Insights
Screenshot from the National Hurricane Center website.

Hurricanes Are A Thing Of The Past

As of Sept. 16, there had been zero Atlantic hurricanes. Not since 1941 have we gone so far into hurricane season without one forming. Global warming, it seems, has failed to do its job as demanded by the climate zealots and grifters.

There has been at least one hurricane every year since the historical record began in 1851. There’s time for one or more storms to form this year, as there are still about two months left in the Atlantic hurricane season, which ends Nov. 30. It seems more likely, though, that we are living in the first year that there will be no hurricanes on record since researchers began documenting them in 1851. The Atlantic Accumulated Cyclone Energy index is running “about 85% below the 1991–2020 climatological normal for this point in the season,” says Pierre Gosselin of the No Tricks Zone, a site that offers a healthy dose of climate skepticism.

All the best people have been telling us for decades that man’s use of fossil fuels was going to increase hurricane frequency and intensity, much like the London-based Independent assured us in 2000 that in Great Britain “Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past.”

Of course this was nonsense. It still snows in Britain. Yet this didn’t stop a Bloomberg opinion crank from declaring in 2024 that snow was “becoming a thing of the past” because humans have been “warping the climate by burning fossil fuels.” We wonder how he’s handling the news in 2026 that the recent five-year mass gain in Antarctic ice sheet “was driven by a massive increase in snow and ice accumulation.” 

But honesty has never been a character trait associated with warmists. Take, for instance, the media assurance that the continental U.S. “experienced its hottest meteorological summer on record in 2026.” It’s bunk, says meteorologist Anthony Watts.

“That claim is misleading, based on an incomplete causal analysis. The best available evidence suggests that much of the reported ‘record’ depends on adjusted temperature datasets and weather stations increasingly affected by urban development, while the nation’s highest-quality climate network tells a very different story.”

Watts has long warned of the folly of reaching conclusions from temperature station data, a science-based judgment backed by University of Alabama-Huntsville climate scientist Roy Spencer, who has determined that “65% of the U.S. linear warming trend between 1895 and 2023 was due to increasing population density at the suburban and urban stations; 8% of the warming was due to urbanization at rural stations.”

Meanwhile, we wait for the Atlantic Ocean to spin up its next hurricane. We also wait for the climate alarmists to stop predicting imminent doom. It’s unfortunate, but the former will almost certainly happen before the latter because fanatics always reach a point at which they can no longer act rationally.

— Written by the I&I Editorial Board

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