It’s climate change, innit? No sooner had Hurricane Ida smashed into the coast of Louisiana with winds of around 150 mph than the usual claims began to be made, the ones we get every time a hurricane makes landfall in the US: that it has been caused in part by man-made climate change. Climate models have tended to predict that tropical storms will become stronger as warmer seas lead to more energy being absorbed by the storms. Trouble is, observational evidence does not suggest that this has happened — at least not yet.
A Princeton University paper published in Nature Communications last month analyses data that has been collected on tropical storms in the North Atlantic since 1851. While the overall number of storms shows an upwards trend, the same is not true of storms that make landfall in the US.
There is a reason for this: while records of storms exist since 1851 they cannot be taken to be complete records.
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