The lazy assertion that Hurricane Dorian is caused by climate change

Hurricane Dorian had hardly struck the shores of the Bahamas before Twitter began to fill up with comments willing it to carry on and flatten Donald Trump’s Mar a Lago estate in Florida ‘to teach the climate change denier-in-chief’ a lesson.

Others eviscerated Florida senator and former governor Rick Scott for suggesting on Fox News that ‘we don’t know what the cause is’ of a run of strong hurricanes.  From Al Gore to David Attenborough, footage of hurricanes is used as a staple background for films about climate change, the inference being that the viewer is watching the effects of a dreadful, man-made disaster which would not have occurred had it not been for human-induced climate change.

Dorian is an especially severe storm which has already caused one reported death and will inevitably leave vast destruction in its trail. But you don’t need to make light of that, nor defend the ignorance of Donald Trump (who has expressed surprise on several occasions that there is such a thing as a category five storm, in spite of the current hurricane measurement system having been in use since 1971), to recognise that Rick Scott is correct.