Not all false narratives are created equal.
Not all false narratives are created equal.
T he press is in the midst of a panic about hurricane misinformation.
According to a New York Times headline, “Bizarre Falsehoods About Hurricanes Helene and Milton Disrupt Recovery Efforts.”
“Officials have said this week,” the paper reports, “that the disinformation about Hurricanes Helene and Milton was making relief workers a target, and the American Red Cross warned that the outlandish claims could prevent survivors from seeking help.”
The article then fails to cite a single example of someone assaulting relief workers or refusing assistance to justify its premise or headline.
Of course, what Marjorie Taylor Greene — who believes sinister actors are manipulating the weather — and others are peddling is rank nonsense that should be rebutted, whether it’s causing real-world consequences or not.
Greene and her ilk aren’t the only source of hurricane disinformation, though.
If we care about accuracy, which we should, and if we worry about unfounded fears influencing real-world outcomes — again, we should — then there’s much more influential false and misleading information being spread about the connection between the frequency and intensity of hurricanes and changes in the climate.
The idea that there is a direct, established link between warming and any given storm is prevalent at the top of our government and in our elite media. This notion is being used not merely to entertain and fool people who get their information from anonymous accounts on X but to try to reorient the American economy by government edict.
This narrative has more credibility than MTG’s nuttery, since there are scientists and researchers who are willing to push it, but it is still insidious and wrong.
Surveying damage from Hurricane Helene, President Biden said the other day, “Storms are getting stronger and stronger.”
“Nobody can deny the impact of the climate crisis anymore,” he added. “They must be brain-dead if they do.”
The media have, of course, been piling on. A piece in The Hill had this lede: “Climate change is making hurricanes like Hurricane Helene more intense, scientific research shows.”
The fascist-obsessive Substacker and Yale professor Timothy Synder pronounced,
As the earth heats and the storms and droughts become worse and worse, Trump and Vance will suppress the science and blame the scientists. The plan to fire all the meteorologists is already there. Project 2025 will eliminate the National Weather Service and make climate change a taboo subject inside the federal government. This direct courting of death is itself quite fascist.
There’s the narrative, then there are the facts.
Last year, Roger Pielke, the influential writer on scientific affairs, and the meteorologist Ryan Maue wrote, “In 2022 there were 18 total landfalling tropical cyclones of at least hurricane strength around the world, of which 5 were major hurricanes. Since 1970 the median values are 16 total hurricanes, with 5 of major hurricane strength. So 2022 was very close to the median of the past half century.”
They noted that, at the time they were writing, the last two years had seen nearly the least activity over the last 40 years or so.
They noted there’s been no trend in so-called accumulated cyclone energy globally since 1980.
The theory is that warmer oceans will, eventually, mean somewhat more intense hurricanes. Even if the climate models are correct, though, we are talking about small changes over a long period of time.
“One big reason for this,” Pielke and Maue explained, “is that tropical cyclones have a lot of variability in interannual and interdecadal time scales and projected changes in storm behavior are relatively much smaller. A common error in media coverage of hurricanes is to suggest that small trends possibly detectable later this century can be observed in the behavior of individual storms today.”
There are all manner of reputable authorities that the press could cite to avoid its hysteria.
The latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment of cyclones said “there is still no consensus on the relative magnitude of human and natural influences on past changes in Atlantic hurricane activity,” that it is uncertain whether past changes “are outside the range of natural variability.”
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration found: “In summary, it is premature to conclude with high confidence that increasing atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations from human activities have had a detectable impact on Atlantic basin hurricane activity, although increasing greenhouse gases are strongly linked to global warming.”
“Human activities,” it continued, “may have already caused other changes in tropical cyclone activity that are not yet detectable due to the small magnitude of these changes compared to estimated natural variability, or due to observational limitations.”
The EPA noted in 2021:
Since 1878, about six to seven hurricanes have formed in the North Atlantic every year. Roughly two per year make landfall in the United States. The total number of hurricanes (particularly after being adjusted for improvements in observation methods) and the number reaching the United States do not indicate a clear overall trend since 1878.
The press apparently doesn’t understand the difference between “not yet detectable” and “the obvious force making every powerful storm worse.”
The New York Times just ran a piece headlined, “Global Warming Made Helene More Menacing, Researchers Say.” It is based on the work of two dozen researchers affiliated with an agenda-driven group called World Weather Attribution. None of the official assessments above are mentioned. Same with a CNN story pegged to the work of the same outfit that ran under the headline, “Helene was supercharged by ultra-warm water made up to 500 times more likely by global warming, study finds.”
As it happens, the New York Times article on hurricane misinformation itself traffics in unsupported claims:
The increasing frequency and devastating power of major storms, heat waves, wildfires and other weather-related catastrophes tend to elicit an especially strong emotional response, allowing climate denialists, lobbyists for the oil and gas industry and rumormongers to exploit people’s concern and confusion.
It’s actually the opposite. The advocates who insist on a readily discernible connection between climate change and destructive storms know it’s the most emotive argument they can muster, so all nuances and inconvenient facts are cast aside.
In other words, it’s not misinformation as such that’s the problem. What matters is who is misinforming whom, and in behalf of what cause.