BeeLine: It's Climate Change!

The devastation that Hurricane Ian has wrought on Florida is bringing out the usual suspects claiming that none of this would have occurred but for climate change.

Source: https://nbc-2.com/news/local/2022/09/29/swfl-cancellations-closures/

How do you get that type of flooding?

Here is a graph of the ocean levels in Fort Myers as monitored by the NOAA since noon on September 28 until 700pm on September 29.

The red line represents actual water levels and blue line is what is normally predicted.

At its peak, the ocean water level was 8.57 feet. That is over 7 feet higher than normal.

You take that storm surge from the ocean and the level topography along the coast and it does not take much to flood a wide area.

Can we not stop and and grieve some about the damages and losses that the people of Florida have sustained without immediately attempting to politicize it?

I guess not.

Here is CNN's Don Lemon attempting to get the Acting Director of the NOAA Hurricane Center to link climate change to the hurricane.

Source: https://twitter.com/tomselliott/status/1575062381763461124

Don Lemon may have grown up in Florida but he does not seem to have a very good grasp on the history of hurricane activity in that state over the years.

For example, meteorologist Joe Bastardi of weatherbell.com shared the historical hurricane activity in Florida and along the east coast of the United States in a Twitter post that reveals this fact that seems little known.

There were many more hurricanes to hit Florida and the Atlantic coast of the United States in 1916-1965 than in the following 50 years.

There have also only been three hurricanes that have hit Florida since 2015.

Irma 2017

Michael 2018

Ian 2022

Note that there were no hurricanes which made landfall in Florida in 2019, 2020 or 2021.

Covid must have kept them away.

Florida also did not have any hurricanes that touched the state for nearly 12 years between 2005 and 2017.

No one seems to remember that right now.

A big reason these storms appear so much more destructive is that so much development has been done along the Florida coasts in the last half century.

There are many more people affected and a lot more property damage.

The area of SW Florida which has the most damage from Ian has seen a massive increase in population over the last 40 years.

Fort Myers, Fort Myers Beach, Sanibel, Cape Coral and Bonita Springs are all in Lee County.

Naples and Marco Island are in Collier County.

Population in both of these areas has grown about four times the size they were in 1980.

Source: https://usafacts.org/data/topics/people-society/population-and-demographics/our-changing-population/state/florida/county/lee-county?endDate=2021-01-01&startDate=1980-01-01

Source: https://usafacts.org/data/topics/people-society/population-and-demographics/our-changing-population/state/florida/county/collier-county?endDate=2021-01-01&startDate=1980-01-01

This chart shows the increase in the overall population of Florida since 1900.

Over 20 million people inhabit the state compared to less than 4 million who lived there when I first visited the state in 1955.

Of course, when assessing any connection between climate change and hurricane activity it is not wise to just focus solely on this one event or what has even occurred in Florida alone over the years.

What has happened globally with regard to hurricane activity over the last 40 years?

Based on the narrative you would think that there has been increasing global activity to go with rising levels of fossil fuel use and carbon emissions.

However, global data on the number of hurricanes since 1980 (the first year reliable satellite data was available) shows no discernible change in either their size or intensity since then.

Colorado State University tracks this data.

Source: https://wattsupwiththat.com/2022/09/29/after-hurricane-ian-no-trend-in-florida-landfalls-global-activity-trending-down/

A peer-reviewed study published earlier this year found that Atlantic storms had increased since 1990 due to warmer waters that are the fuel that drives hurricane activity.

However, the increase in storms in the Atlantic was more than offset by fewer hurricanes and cyclones in the Pacific which has seen cooling water temperatures.

This was not caused by human-caused climate change but a shift from El Nino to La Lina weather conditions over most of the time period studied.

These are the key points as published in that study "Trends in Global Tropical Cyclone Activity; 1990-2021" as published in the Geophysical Research Letters of Advancing Earth and Space Science.