A recent broadcast weather segment on CBS News, Los Angeles, titled “Helene gaining strength from climate change effects,” features a staff meteorologist claiming that hurricane Helene was strengthened by climate change, and that indeed hurricanes in general are increasing in intensity and power.
The CBS video description reads “…Helene is gaining strength from warmer waters in the Gulf of Mexico, an effect linked to climate change that appears to make hurricanes and storms more powerful.” The CBS anchor hands the segment over to meteorologist Marina Jurica, who alleges that “the increasing intensity of hurricanes is basically rooted in physics… hurricanes draw energy from that warm ocean water and as that climate change causes sea surface temperatures to rise the energy available for these storms increases.” It is true that warm sea surface temperatures contribute to hurricane formation, However, they are far from the only element, and in fact for most of this hurricane season, despite warmer-than-average sea surface temperatures, storms struggled to form at all.
Starting with the Hurricane Harvey anecdote, when the storm hit Texas in 2017, it was the first major hurricane to make landfall in the United States since 2005, after a 12-year major hurricane drought in one of the most active tropical storm regions in the world.
It is actually shocking how wrong CBS is with regards to what actual hurricane data show, which is that hurricanes are not getting more intense, frequent, or powerful.
Even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) agrees, stating that there is “only low confidence for the attribution of any detectable changes in tropical cyclone activity to anthropogenic influences.” The CBS broadcast was before Helene made landfall, and while hurricane Helene proved to be very destructive, it is not unprecedented.
CBS’s meteorologist is either shockingly poorly informed about hurricane data or just doesn’t care about facts, despite her training as a meteorologist.
The longest such major hurricane drought since records have been kept in the United States.
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