Sorry, New York Times, No Evidence Shows Hurricane Erin was Driven by Climate Change

The New York Times (NYT) published an article titled “How Climate Change Affects Hurricanes Like Erin,” in which they rely on rapid attribution analysis to claim that climate change is making rapidly intensifying hurricanes more likely, implying that the storm was worsened by global warming. This is false. Attribution studies are generally not based on solid scientific evidence and therefore not provable. Plus, evidence is lacking to support the idea that rapid intensification is actually becoming more common.

At the outset, the NYT claimed that hurricane Erin’s effects, such that they are, “are made worse by global warming,” even though the storm stayed offshore. The storm intensified quickly from a Category 1 to a Category 5 hurricane, and NYT claims that “[a]s the planet warms, scientists say that rapidly intensifying hurricanes are becoming ever more likely.”

First, it is important to note that just because a storm is among the most rapidly intensifying on record, does not mean there were not similar storms that failed to be recorded. As mentioned in a previous Climate Realism post about hurricane Erin, hurricane measurement technology is far advanced today from where it was even a few decades ago. Before widespread use of Hurricane Hunter flights starting in the 70s where offshore storms were first closely monitored and directly measured throughout their lifespan, other rapidly intensifying storms would not have made the record. So there is uncertainty of the record there.

Beyond that, attribution researchers and NYT would like to blame hurricane intensification all on warm surface water temperatures, but rapid intensification occurs in response to a variety of factors lining up just right. Similar claims  were made two years ago concerning hurricane Otis. That storm also intensified rapidly over a single day, turning into a Category 5 before hutting the west coast of Mexico. Otis did not intensify under expected conditions, thunderstorm bursts that forecasters were unable to predict are now believed to have been responsible for its rapid intensification.

Just as some scientists say more intense storms are more likely with warming, other scientists say that they will become less likely to form, or less likely to strike land. The NYT neglected to mention these perspectives, focusing its story on the scarier opinions that support the narrative that climate change is responsible for worsening extreme weather events.

In fact, as Climate at A Glance: Hurricanes details, there is no data suggesting hurricanes are becoming more frequent or more intense.

The NYT cites an event attribution group, Climate Central (CC), as the main source of its claim that climate change is the reason hurricanes are intensifying more rapidly, writing that CC did an analysis which found that “human-caused climate change made the warm water temperature around where Erin formed at least 90 times more likely.”

As Climate Realism has addressed previously concerning claims that climate change was responsible for various extreme weather events, attribution studies are not proof or even evidence. They are suffer from the fatal logical fallacy of affirming the consequent. The scholars assume from the outset that climate change played a role in the events and then run counterfactual models consisting of a modeled world without human carbon dioxide emissions, and compare its results, not with the real world, but with model outputs of a world with human greenhouse gas emissions. The analysts then assume the difference between the two sets of model runs is the result of human activities, and accurately reflect the real world.  The problem is, neither the counterfactual world nor the “rising greenhouse gas world” accurately portray the nuances of the real world. We simply don’t understand all the conditions that drive climate change, much less individual extreme weather events — its the assumptions built into the models that drive the results, and those assumptions reflect the biases of the authors that human activities are driving climate change. The mainstream media often treats these attribution outcomes as if they results were verified through independent testing and/or reflected measured data, when neither is the case.

The Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says that it is “premature to conclude with high confidence that human-caused increases in greenhouse gases have caused a change in past Atlantic basin hurricane activity that is outside the range of natural variability,” based on measured data. Though they do say that Atlantic hurricane activity seems to have increased since 1980, that trend isn’t representative of a longer-term trend once older data is assessed. They explain “[s]ubstantial multidecadal variability in the Atlantic basin confounds efforts to detect long-term greenhouse gas-induced trends.”

Single event attribution studies tend to be, as described by climate scientist Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. when discussing attribution modeling for Hurricane Dorian, “sensitivity analysis of an actual storm” to “prescribed” conditions in another model. Pielke says it’s interesting modelling, but “it can say nothing about the cause of Dorian or its intensity.”

The same is true of Erin. The modelers assume that human-caused global warming influenced the rapid intensification of the storm; build a model with conditions that would reflect that, then compared it to an approximate model of the real storm in question. This is not evidence, it is confirmation bias.

There are a lot of predictions and model projections out there with various end results for hurricane formation under different scenarios, but none of them are substitutes for observed data. The NYT is not alone when it comes to leaning heavily on single-event attribution peddlers like Climate Central, but certainly should be criticized and called out when they do so. In this case, the article contained both scientific and journalistic malpractice.

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