It’s been a tough couple of weeks for CNN’s chief propagandist Don Lemon.
First, he was demolished by a British Royal commentator on the history of African slavery.
Then he got demoted to a daytime panel.
And this week Don got schooled in front of a national audience for blaming Hurricane Ian on global warming.
The NOAA Director Jamie Rohme was having none of it.
Don Lemon: Can you tell us what this is and climate change has on this phenomenon?
Jaime Rohme: We can come back and talk about climate change at a later time. I want to focus on the here and now…
Don Lemon: What effect does climate change have on this phenomenon that is happening now? Because it seems these storms are intensifying. That’s a question.
Jaime Rohme: I don’t think you can link climate change to any one event. on a whole, on an accumulative, climate change may be making storms worse. But to link it to any one event, I would caution against that.
Don Lemon got schooled again.
This is amazing. Don Lemon tries to blame Hurricane Ian on climate change. NOAA's hurricane director shuts him down. pic.twitter.com/svTjHtE8hl
— Alex Pfeiffer (@__Pfeiffer) September 28, 2022
For the record — Hurricanes ARE NOT bigger, stronger, and more dangerous today than in previous centuries.
Roger Pielke at Forbes reported:
From 1900 to 1958, the first half of the period under study, NOAA reports that there were 117 total hurricanes that struck the mainland U.S.. But in contrast, G19 has only 92. They are missing 25 hurricanes. In the second half of the dataset, from 1959 to 2017, NOAA has 91 hurricanes that struck the U.S., and G19 has 155, that is 64 extra hurricanes.
The AP passed along the incorrect information when it reported that the new study looks at “247 hurricanes that hit the U.S. since 1900.” According to NOAA, from 1900 to 2017 there were in fact only 197 hurricanes that made 208 unique landfalls (9 storms had multiple landfalls).
Part of this difference can be explained by the fact that G19 focus on economic damage, not hurricanes. If a hurricane from early in the 20th century resulted in no reported damage, then according to G19 it did not exist. That’s one reason why we don’t use economic data to make conclusions about climate. A second reason for the mismatched counts is that G19 counts many non-hurricanes as hurricanes, and disproportionately so in the second half of the dataset.
The mismatch between hurricane counts in G19 versus those of NOAA by itself calls into question the entire paper. But it gets much worse.
The dataset on losses from hurricanes used by G19 to generate its top-line conclusions is based on my research. That dataset has been maintained by a company called ICAT located in Colorado. The ICAT dataset was initially created about a decade ago by a former student and collaborator of mine, Joel Gratz, based entirely on our 2008 hurricane loss dataset (which I’ll call P08).
Hurricanes are not more frequent today than they were a century ago – no matter how long you manipulate the data.
