Climate kooks get hurricanes wrong

 Daily Signal:

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Yet is Hurricane Helene really proof that man-made climate change is making life more dangerous in the U.S.?

The Heritage Foundation special report “Keeping an Eye on the Storms: An Analysis of Trends in Hurricanes Over Time” answers definitively in the negative.

In the report, Joe D’Aleo, visiting fellow in Heritage’s Center for Energy, Climate, and Environment, and Kevin Dayaratna, chief statistician in Heritage’s Center for Data Analysis, break down the data.

Hurricanes have long plagued the continental United States, tracing back as far as the Great Colonial Hurricane of 1635, which hit the Jamestown Settlement and the Massachusetts Bay Colony only 15 years after the founding of Plymouth Plantation. From 1900 to 1960, no fewer than 112 hurricanes hit the continental U.S., long before the burning of fossil fuels on a mass scale.

The deadliest natural disaster in U.S. history did not take place after the burning of fossil fuels, but before. The Galveston Hurricane killed between 8,000 and 12,000 people—in 1900.

D’Aleo and Dayaratna note that U.S. average high temperatures have increased since the 1950s, and that the burning of fossil fuels has increased since the 1950s on a global scale.
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If the burning of fossil fuels and the increase in global temperature do not account for hurricane trends, what does?

D’Aleo and Dayaratna identify three better explanations.

The El Niño-Southern Oscillation cycle describes how alternating periods of warming and cooling in the central and eastern parts of the Pacific Ocean near the Equator affect the climate in South America, the Southwestern U.S., Australia, and Southeast Asia. El Niño, the warm phase, leads to wetter conditions in the U.S. and South America, along with drier conditions in Australia and Southeast Asia. La Niña, the colder phase, leads to wetter conditions in Australia and Asia, along with drier conditions in the Americas.

Scientists have long found correlations between U.S. hurricanes and these cycles. A 1984 study found that of the 54 major hurricanes striking the U.S. between 1900 and 1983, only four hit landfall in the 16 El Niño years, while 50 struck in the 68 non-16 El Niño years. Later research found that hurricanes have a 71% greater chance of reaching the U.S. East coast in La Niña years than El Niño years.
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There is much more.

I have lived in Texas for several decades in various parts of the state and have never experienced a destructive hurricane although my family did endure a hurricane while I was going through Marine Corps officer training in Quantico, Virginia in the 1960's.  I think my dad may have lost a fruit tree in the storm, but the house was unscathed and there was no serious flooding.   The population of Texas has grown significantly since then but the threat of hurricanes has not.