Hurricanes have been in the news lately, thanks to the United States
getting whacked by hurricanes Helene and Milton in
quick succession. The two hurricanes followed intersecting tracks, with
some areas of the U.S. state of Florida getting grazed or hit by both
storms.
Milton near peak intensity just north of the Yucatán Peninsula on
October 7, image from Wikimedia Commons
Both hurricanes were enhanced by record-high sea surface temperatures
in the Gulf of Mexico. This led to the storms undergoing rapid
intensification. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist – or even a
climate scientist – to suspect this added punch might have something to
do with human-caused global
warming.
Gee, where are all these hurricanes coming from? Image from Wikimedia
Commons.
However, if you are a climate scientist, you might be
working in one of the hotter (no pun intended, although noted) areas of
research in your field right now: Extreme
event attribution. That’s where climate scientists borrow concepts
and methods from epidemiology, such
as attributable
fraction among the exposed, and using techniques such as climate modeling,
they determine the degree to which an extreme weather event was made
more likely, and/or more severe, by human activity.
For a technical introduction to the field, see the short but dense
book Attribution
of Extreme Weather Events in the Context of Climate Change (2016)
from the National
Academies Press. Paper copies are available for purchase or you can
download the
free PDF. And if you can explain chapter 3 to me that would be great
– it turns out that I’m not an expert on climate modeling, go
figure.
But I follow the field enough to know that extreme event attribution
has progressed rapidly. In the prehistoric days of maybe 10 or 15 years
ago, climate scientists might have taken a year or more after a big
storm, drought, heat wave, or wildfire to offer their calculations on
the degree to which climate change made the event more likely and/or
more intense. Today scientists can present those results while a weather
event is so fresh that Trump hasn’t finished lying about it. See for
example World
Weather Attribution’s articles, such as their take on Milton: Yet
another hurricane wetter, windier and more destructive because of
climate change (11 October, 2024). They got that result out to
journalists in time to include with live coverage of the storm and its
immediate aftermath. Although not a game-changer, this new scientific
capability is an important incremental advance in the long battle of
explaining science to the public. Whether these results come out in days
or years doesn’t make much difference to the science, but it can make a
big difference to the short attention spans of laypeople in rapid news
cycles. If you weren’t directly affected by a particular hurricane,
you’ve probably moved on to other concerns after a year.
If you’ve lived in the USA for a while you might suspect that
landfalling hurricane strikes have been getting more frequent and more
intense. And you would not be wrong, although not all of the difference
is directly due to human influence. In the Atlantic
hurricane basin, tropical cyclones form every year during hurricane
season, traditionally spanning the months from June through November
(such storms can form at any time of year, but they’re rare in the
months out of season). As you can see from the historical storm track
map, many storms stay out to sea and do not directly strike the US
mainland – although our Caribbean and Central American neighbors are
often not so lucky. Wikipedia says, “On average, 14 named storms occur
each season in the North Atlantic basin, with 7 becoming hurricanes and
3 becoming major hurricanes (Category 3 or greater).”
Tracks of North Atlantic tropical cyclones from 1851 to 2019, image from
Wikimedia Commons
So, there are multiple Atlantic tropical storms every year, some
usually reaching hurricane strength, and it’s just random luck whether
or not they get steered by winds and fronts into hitting some particular
nation.
After the exceptionally hard hurricane season of 2005, the U.S.
enjoyed a remarkable run of favorable “luck” up to 2016 when Hurricane
Matthew blasted numerous islands including Haiti and the Bahamas,
then grazed the U.S. east coast (without making landfall, but still
causing several billion dollars in damage and claiming 47 American
lives). At the time, “the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of
Marine and Atmospheric Science, tweeted Oct. 5 it [had] been 4,000 days
since the last major hurricane hit the United States (or approximately
10.9 years).”
As will come as no surprise to anyone, climate change deniers at the
time siezed upon the lull in American landfalling major hurricanes as
“proof” that Al Gore
was “wrong”. Gore, as the reader may recall, was and remains
instrumental in bringing climate change to broad public awareness
including with his slide show, TED talk, book, and movie An
Inconvenient Truth (2006). The movie poster features an arresting
graphic of a smokestack belching a hurricane-shaped cloud, rather
un-subtlely suggesting the causal link. The movie came out shortly after
the then-record-setting 2005
Atlantic hurricane season. At the time climate scientists had been
warning about the obvious connection between a warming climate resulting
in warmer sea surface temperatures which would make conditions more
favorable for tropical cyclones to form and gain intensity. However,
other factors (such as wind shear) also influence cyclogenesis, so
it’s not quite as simple as “hotter planet, more storms.” The 2005
Atlantic hurricane season was exceptional for its time (indeed, it’s
still exceptional, although no longer sui generis, having been
rivaled in some aspects by subsequent highly active seasons). In no way
were climate scientists claiming 2005 represented a new normal for
landfalling major hurricanes hitting the USA, but rather to point out
that the odds were steadily creeping up in lockstep with the Keeling Curve. So
whether it might take years or decades for the figurative chickens to
come home to roost, persisting with our fossil-fueled business as usual
meant they were coming. Or perhaps instead of chickens I should call
them gray swans.
(That’s a play on the term black swan
which refers to a possible event which was previously unknown and
unexpected; a gray swan is an event that scientists already know is
possible but has not happened yet, or at least has not happened since
humans began keeping good records. Climate change science abounds with
gray swans.)
But despite all that nuance, climate change deniers siezed on the
America-centric landfalling major hurricane lull post-2005 as evidence
that climate change was bunk.
Even at the time that was already a technicality, since a “major”
hurricane is one with wind speeds of Category 3 or higher on the Saffir–Simpson
scale. However, wind speed is only one measure of a storm’s severity
and destructive impact. In 2012, Hurricane Sandy
struck Cuba as a Category 3 hurricane (a major hurricane) before moving
north to menace other countries including the U.S. By the time Sandy
made landfall in the U.S. state of New Jersey, it was “only” an
extra-tropical cyclone with hurricane force winds of Category 1
strength, but the extremely large size of the storm (the largest
tropical cyclone ever seen in the Atlantic) extended its impacts to 24
U.S. states and several Canadian provinces. It inflicted $68.7 billion
(2012 USD) in damage, $65 billion in the U.S., making it the
seventh-costliest hurricane in U.S. history. So, the hurricane “lull”
wasn’t much of one.
Among the deniers making hay off of that trope was a very
well-compensated one, the late Rush Limbaugh.
Limbaugh “was the host of The Rush Limbaugh Show, which first aired in
1984 and was nationally syndicated on AM and FM radio stations from 1988
until his death in 2021.” Limbaugh was one of the most influential
figures in the American conservative movement after the Ronald Reagan
era. He pioneered the use of grievances and lies to energize and grift
the same subset of Americans that Donald Trump later continued to
energize and grift with the same playbook. Limbaugh made lying cool
again, to such an extent that even some conservatives took pause. See
for example: Rush
Limbaugh Leaves Behind a Conservative Movement No Longer Interested in
Truth. That Alarms Me as a Conservative (February 17, 2021) by Joe
Walsh.
Limbaugh authored seven books with the first two making the New
York Times best-seller list. His second book, See,
I Told You So (1993), inspired the snarky title of this blog post:
See, Al Gore Told You So. In 1993, climate change science was
still in its middle school phase, and the world was much less far along
with the increasing pace of climate change impacts we see today (and
which are likely to grow geometrically worse in the coming decades,
barring an unprecedented and unlikely collective human effort to stop
burning fossil fuels). But even way back then, Limbaugh was denying
climate science with arguments whose irrelevance was only rivaled by
their nonfactuality. For example, Limbaugh claimed, falsely, that U.S.
forest cover was then higher than it was when the White Man first landed
on what is now the United States. The actual figure was 75%, or about a
quarter of the originally forested land was then de-forested, and very
little of the original old-growth forest remained, most having been
logged at some point. But as anyone who has read much about climate
science knows, this factoid has very little to do with the climate
change forecast. First, while forests matter to climate change, both in
terms of causes and effects, they aren’t the main cause: fossil fuels
are. Second, the state of the world in 1993 wasn’t what climate change
was mainly about – instead climate scientists were making predictions
about the future. By analogy, in 1993 Rush Limbaugh hadn’t gotten lung
cancer yet.
An increasing number of those climate change predictions are coming
true right now, such as the obliteration of Limbaugh’s 2016 talking
point. Only a clinically insane person could imagine that the USA is
experiencing any kind of lull in landfalling major hurricanes now.
Sadly, or perhaps not sadly in the minds of his many victims, Limbaugh
isn’t around to experience his comeuppance, not that he would have
mourned the loss of a single talking point. Limbaugh died at age 70 on
February 17, 2021 of lung cancer. He
was a longtime cigar smoker and a former cigarette smoker. Wikipedia
says he had previously downplayed the link between smoking and cancer
deaths, arguing that it “takes 50 years to kill people, if it does.”
Depending on when Limbaugh started smoking, he might have been about
right on that 50 year figure. Even so, he probably robbed the world of a
good ten more years of his disinforming, at least.
As a slight consolation, conservative disinformation has led to the
emergence of numerous fact-checking
sites; here
is a list. Given the amount of disinformation Limbaugh spread during
his career, he commands a lot of space in the fact-checking ecosystem.
See for example these PolitiFact
links:
10
fact-checks of Rush Limbaugh, Medal of Freedom winner by Angie
Drobnic Holan
Limbaugh:
Lack of major hurricanes disproves climate change by Allison
Graves
Allison Graves’ fact-checking piece is directly relevant to this
post, as it shows how Limbaugh’s talking point wasn’t even right in the
year 2016 when the American landfalling major hurricane lull was still a
thing. Graves hits all the right notes, but the article could use an
update since it doesn’t reflect recent progress in extreme event
attribution, which I mentioned near the top of this post.
As a general rule I recommend always looking up the fact-checks
whenever you read or hear any politician on the right spouting off. You
can do the same thing for politicians on the left, but it turns out that
left-leaning politicians lie considerably less often. And when they do
lie or misstate and get fact-checked, they often issue retractions,
while right-leaning politicans tend to double down on their lies.
Politicians on the right tend to decry the fact-checkers as “radical
left fake news” when those politicians themselves get fact-checked, and
then they tweet and tout the same fact-checkers on those rare occasions
when they catch a politician on the left in a Pinnochio. (“Pinnochio” is
a rating system for falsehoods coined by Glenn
Kessler, a journalist and fact-checker for the Washington
Post.)
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