Originally shared by Travis Harrellfrom Bjørn Lomborg
A lot of people want to claim that hurricane Harvey is caused by climate change.
But for all categories of US landfalling hurricanes, there are
fewer not more hurricanes today than in the past.
Here you see the trends since 1878 in batches of two decades (there are too few hurricanes to make one decade meaningful). 2017 contains all the hurricanes from 1998-2017. 1997 contains all the hurricanes from 1978-1997 etc.
The trend for the strongest hurricanes (cat 4+) is downwards.
The trend for major hurricanes (cat 3+) is downwards.
The trend for hurricanes cat 2+ is downwards.
And the trend for all hurricanes is downwards.
It is likely that global warming will, in the long run, create somewhat stronger, but fewer hurricanes, although we can't see this yet in the data.
MOREOVER, if you want to help future victims of future hurricane Harveys, tackling climate change is the most expensive way to help the least.
Climate affects hurricanes marginally, and our climate policies affect climate marginally. Even policies like Paris, which will cost $1+ trillion a year, will do trivially little to help future victims.
INSTEAD, we should focus on
better infrastructure, porous surfaces, and drainage (get rid of water faster),
levees and dams (to avoid flooding),
better building codes (creating safer houses),
better zoning (don't build in flood plains or on the coast, where the risk is the highest) and
dropping subsidies for insurance (which encourages building in high-risk areas).
This would help much more, much faster, much cheaper.
This does not mean we shouldn't fix climate in the long run, through higher investment in green R&D. But it means that using Harvey to argue for demonstrating climate impacts runs against the evidence across the past 140 years. And using Harvey to advocate for climate policies first is simply bad policy advice.
It will waste more money while helping much less.
Data:
http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/tcfaq/E23.html and 2017 from
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Atlantic_hurricane_season
Least-square trendlines added
from Bjørn Lomborg
A lot of people want to claim that hurricane Harvey is caused by climate change.
But for all categories of US landfalling hurricanes, there are fewer not more hurricanes today than in the past.
Here you see the trends since 1878 in batches of two decades (there are too few hurricanes to make one decade meaningful). 2017 contains all the hurricanes from 1998-2017. 1997 contains all the hurricanes from 1978-1997 etc.
The