A view of His Majesty's Ship Thisbe, Charles Dudley Parker Esq. Commander at sea in a Hurricane on the 23rd August 1798 in Latitude 44: 00 N & Longd 44: 00 West, by A. Hodge Second Lieutenant
A Washington Post-ABC News poll released on Thursday shows that 55% of Americans think that the severity of recent hurricanes is most likely “the result of global climate change.” That people believe this is not surprising—we are told over and over: man-made global warming has made the Gulf of Mexico warmer and the air more humid thereby making tropical cyclones—called hurricanes in the North Atlantic—more frequent and more intense. ‘We must reduce our carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions to lessen the increasing hurricane threat,’ they claim.
But this is completely wrong. Dr. Roy Spencer, a principal research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville explains that “major hurricanes don’t really care whether the Gulf [of Mexico] is above average or below average in temperature.” Similarly, M. Mohapatra and V. Vijay Kumar of the India Meteorological Department state in their March 2017 research paper, "there is a decreasing trend in the tropical cyclone number over the North Indian Ocean in recent years, though there is an increasing trend in the sea surface temperature...”
