Hurricanes and Atmospheric C02

Well, since I’ve just had the displeasure of living though this lovely experience here in Texas, which created serious human needs which are not helped by making a disaster a political football……I was inspired to do some math.

Are devastating hurricanes a product of changing environmental conditions?

Well, that’s sort of a broad question that requires a lot more number-crunching that I am inclined to do between conference calls. But, more specifically, after hearing about a particularly devastating Atlantic storm in the 1920’s, I became interested in knowing if there was any correlation between atmospheric C02 levels and the intensity of Atlantic storms.

The charts on atmospheric C02 levels are easy to find. What I did was take the ice-core estimates and Mauna Loa C02 data from 1880 and created a dataset from that; the C02 increase curve during that period looks like this:

Ironic, isn’t it, that the only “break” in the upwards trend of that slope line came during WW2? Apparently killing millions of your fellow man is environmentally friendly. :-(

Anyway, that’s a pretty familiar graph to anyone who plays around with climate data. 280–290 ppm is apparently the global baseline for atmospheric C02, which prior to the Industrial Revolution varied only by what major volcano was blowing its top at the time.

So, once you have THAT, it’s pretty easy to run a regression against the worst storm, measured in mbars, by year. For that, I used the NCOA HURDAT database, which you can see here, if you want to get a quick headache.

The strongest storms by year chart, btw, looks like this. The lower the value, the stronger the storm, of course.

So, then, run the regression:

If you’re familiar with regression charts and how they look, you’re not surprised when I tell you that there is almost ZERO correlation between the strongest Atlantic storm in a given year and atmospheric C02. Specifically, R = .08, where 1.00 would be a perfect correlation, and -1.00 a perfect inverse correlation; in other words, if R had a negative value close to 1, the regression would show that as atmospheric CO2 rises, the intensity of the hurricane also rises. This, however, is not the case.

Now, lest this information be misused either to support or enrage, let me make a few points:

1. Don’t accuse me of being anti-science. This IS science.
2. The above says what it says and nothing more. It says that the strongest storm in a given year since 1880 is uncorrelated with atmospheric C02 levels. That’s it. Period.
3. The above doesn’t make a comment about climate change, global warming, greenhouse effects, or any of the other controversial elements vis a vis climate change. It says what it says.

So please, it will do you no benefit to flame me, or repost this and claim it shows anything more that what it shows. Climate change theory has more variables than just atmospheric CO2, although CO2 is either one of, or is (a bit more debatable) the primary variable.

Regardless of how you view THAT debate, however, the stubborn facts stand. Hurricanes of the intensity of Harvey and Irma have been happening in the Atlantic for as long as man has been keeping records, the concentration of C02 in the atmosphere notwithstanding.