One of the claims you will hear from climate change alarmists is that the number of hurricanes hitting the United States is increasing, the problem is that statement is completely false. Here’s a chart showing the number of hurricanes making landfall in the United States, the high mark is 1940-1950, after that the numbers shows a downward trend.
| Decade | Hurricanes Making US Landfall |
|---|---|
| 1861 - 1870 | 15 |
| 1871 - 1880 | 20 |
| 1881 - 1890 | 22 |
| 1891 - 1900 | 21 |
| 1901 - 1910 | 18 |
| 1911 - 1920 | 21 |
| 1921 - 1930 | 13 |
| 1931 - 1940 | 19 |
| 1941 - 1950 | 24 |
| 1951 - 1960 | 17 |
| 1961 - 1970 | 14 |
| 1971 - 1980 | 12 |
| 1981 - 1990 | 15 |
| 1991 - 2000 | 14 |
| 2001 - 2010 | 13 |
| 2011 - 2020 | 20 |
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For the time period of 1860-2004 the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) published hurricane data in an isolated table. After 2004 they started combining tropical storms and hurricane data making it impossible to compare hurricane data. Since a hurricane is a clearly defined weather phenomenon, a tropical storm with winds of 74 mph or higher, we can use data from other sources to fill in the gaps (see Insurance Information Institute Hurricane Data). See
1860-2000 NOAA, and (CLICK TO ENLARGE)
The Insurance Information Institute (III) is an insurance industry trade group that provides and publishes data and research for the insurance industry. They aren't an insurance provider and don't pay out on policies so there's no incentive for them to lie with data. Since a hurricane is a clearly defined weather phenomenon, a tropical storm with winds 74 mph or higher, they are using the same definition as everyone else, and can be used to overcome NOAAs intentional obfuscation of hurricane reporting data. Source Data
2001-2020 III
The downward trend is easier to spot when the data is represented in a graph. The dark blue line is the number of hurricanes making US landfall, the light blue line is the overall trendline for all the data.
Hurricane Landfall Source Data: (CLICK TO ENLARGE)
For the time period of 1860-2004 the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) published hurricane data in an isolated table. After 2004 they started combining tropical storms and hurricane data making it impossible to compare hurricane data. Since a hurricane is a clearly defined weather phenomenon, a tropical storm with winds of 74 mph or higher, we can use data from other sources to fill in the gaps (see Insurance Information Institute Hurricane Data). See
1860-2000 NOAA, and (CLICK TO ENLARGE)
The Insurance Information Institute (III) is an insurance industry trade group that provides and publishes data and research for the insurance industry. They aren't an insurance provider and don't pay out on policies so there's no incentive for them to lie with data. Since a hurricane is a clearly defined weather phenomenon, a tropical storm with winds 74 mph or higher, they are using the same definition as everyone else, and can be used to overcome NOAAs intentional obfuscation of hurricane reporting data. Source Data
2001-2020 III
The data for this chart comes from two places,
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For the time period of 1860-2004 the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) published hurricane data in an isolated table. After 2004 they started combining tropical storms and hurricane data making it impossible to compare hurricane data. Since a hurricane is a clearly defined weather phenomenon, a tropical storm with winds of 74 mph or higher, we can use data from other sources to fill in the gaps (see Insurance Information Institute Hurricane Data). See data for 1860-2000 comes from National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration. Up until the year 2004 they produced a nice easy to use table for all the data, then they stopped reporting hurricanes independently and started combining it with tropical storm data. However the internet is a magical place, and if you know how to phrase your searches properly, you can find almost anything, the
(CLICK TO ENLARGE)
The Insurance Information Institute (III) is an insurance industry trade group that provides and publishes data and research for the insurance industry. They aren't an insurance provider and don't pay out on policies so there's no incentive for them to lie with data. Since a hurricane is a clearly defined weather phenomenon, a tropical storm with winds 74 mph or higher, they are using the same definition as everyone else, and can be used to overcome NOAAs intentional obfuscation of hurricane reporting data. Source Data data for 2001-2020 comes from The Insurance Information Institute (III). Before you start claiming the data is isn’t the same, I’m going to tell you yes it is. A hurricane is a clearly defined weather phenomenon, A hurricane is a tropical storm that has winds of 74 mph or higher. So a tropical storm can’t have winds of 60 mph, but identify as a hurricane, that’s not how real science works. Now it can be a hurricane when it’s out in The Atlantic, lose intensity, drop below 74 mph and then hit the US coastline, that is not classified as a hurricane making landfall in the United States. It’s only classified as hurricane making landfall if it has winds 74 mph or higher when it makes landfall.
You may be looking at the graph, see the decade of 2011-2020 and say look the number of hurricanes increased to 20, does that mean the climate change predictions were right, hardly. If you’re going to claim increased greenhouse gasses are warming the planet and increasing the number of hurricanes there has to be a correlation between the increase of gasses and the increase of hurricanes. There’s no dispute that the amount of CO2 is increasing, and that trendline is increasing, however the trendline for hurricanes is decreasing. Were there 20 hurricanes in the last decade absolutely, but there were 24 hurricanes from 1941-1950, there were 22 hurricanes from 1881-1890, there were 21 hurricanes from 1891-1900, and 21 hurricanes from 1911-1920. All of the time periods I just mentioned had more hurricanes than the last decade and had dramatically less greenhouse gasses being created, so there’s no correlation between greenhouse gasses and the number of hurricanes. Anyone who tells you there is admitting they are making decisions based on their feelings, and ignoring the actual science and the data.
So why do you see news stories with headlines saying this year had a “record number of hurricanes”? If you go back and check you’ll notice they use “hurricanes” in headlines, but in the actual article they say hurricanes AND tropical storms, the word “AND” matters. Here are are some examples of how the “and tropical storms” is used deceptively by the mainstream media:
A brief history lesson, we started named tropical storms in 1953, and they were only named after women, yes I agree that was a pretty sexist thing to do. In 1978 they started using both male and female names. Before 1960 tropical storm and hurricane monitoring was done using observational data, and calculated by hand, so we really weren’t tracking everything. The first weather satellite was launched in 1960, it was an improvement but things were still pretty crude. We didn’t start computer modeling and predicting hurricanes until the late 70’s. Computer were gigantic, expensive and very slow at that time, so things were still pretty hit and miss. As computing power increased, and the costs decreased more, sophisticated models and tracking started happening, but it wasn’t until the late 80’s that they started becoming accurate. Modern computing models are still being tweaked and adjusted, but we really have made remarkable improvements. Why did I spend time explaining that tropical storm monitoring was less accurate in the past, because if you’re going to compare the very accurate storm monitoring we have today to the less accurate monitoring of the past, today’s numbers are always going to be higher.
The media wants to write headlines that say “Hurricanes are Increasing” to push the climate change agenda, however the data doesn’t support that claim. Now if you include tropical storms tracked by todays accurate satellites, to the less accurate human observational data of the past, you can definitely say the number is increasing. Humans are hard wired to parse data quickly, and prioritize the information, so when your brain reads a story that says “This Year Had a Record Number or Hurricanes and Tropical Storms” your brain only remembers “Record Number of Hurricanes This Year” and you completely forget “and tropical storms”. However, once you know the media is lying to you, and you are on the lookout for it, you’ll see it everywhere.
Lastly you may be wondering about news images and headlines about the damage from hurricanes and tropical storms, because there seem to be a lot more of them lately. That’s a completely different problem that’s caused by greedy developers, and corrupt local governments, allowing housing to be be built in areas that had been deemed too high risk in the past. We go into more detail in our article It' hard to deny the footage on the news showing the damage caused by a hurricane making landfall, but this isn't proof that climate change is increasing the strength and and intensity of hurricanes. The increased damage you see is more often caused by greedy developers, and corrupt local governments, allowing communities to be built in areas that were previously deemed too high risk, and not making plans to deal with urbanization. Read more in our full article about Are Hurricanes Getting Stronger.Are Hurricanes Getting Stronger and 
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One of the most important life lessons you can learn is that Main Stream Media has no problem using deceptive coverage of a news event to push an agenda they agree with. This is especially true of their coverage tropical storms, hurricanes, and flooding which is used to make you believe the climate change agenda. In this article we'll show you proof of how they are lying to you, see How Main Stream Media Exaggerates Hurricane Coverage How Main Stream Media Exaggerates Hurricane Coverage.