Climate Change Voodoo Math

This has been an absolutely devastating hurricane season thus far. Especially if you are a fire-and-brimstone-preaching, doomsday climate fanatic who loves nothing better than to use every hurricane to predict the sky is falling while insisting we only have X years left to save life on Earth. This is because so far you’ve had nothing tropical weather-related to yawp about until Hurricane Isaias came a-callin’ deep into this year’s Atlantic tropical season. Ordinarily, every occurrence of nature’s largest storms is an opportunity to indulge in climate-inspired psychodrama as if there was something unprecedented about any of it. There isn’t. And this year offers yet more proof.

But first things first. Who named this hurricane? Isaias. Huh? That is a total DEI name! Nobody can pronounce it. The television weather people were tripping all over it. Why was it assigned such an unpronounceable name?

Oh. It’s the Spanish form of Isaiah, the biblical prophet. Well then, why didn’t they just call it Isaiah? Because the Atlantic hurricane list deliberately includes Spanish and French names, rather than sticking to just English. So, as I said, DEI.

But let’s back up 21 years to Hurricane Katrina, an easy, pronounceable name. You will recall that Katrina devastated New Orleans, primarily the result of flooding due mostly to engineering and infrastructure maintenance failures. In any case, after Katrina, which occurred during an extraordinarily active tropical season, the climate kooks went coo-coo for Cocoa Puffs and declared this the new normal, which would only get worse unless something was done. (Like returning to the preindustrial age.)

You know what happened next? The United States went into the longest drought of major (category 3 or greater) landfalling hurricanes in about 150 years. The so-called “new normal” totally fizzled and slinked away into climate obscurity for the next 12 years. That was after we were warned that from then on, Katrinas would slam every Atlantic coastal city south of the Canadian border every year, pretty much from Memorial Day through Thanksgiving, and possibly into New Year's Eve.

Turns out, the climate prediction business isn’t so easy—particularly for fanatics who don’t know what they’re talking about to begin with, like the Hollywood types or AOC.

That hurricane drought wasn’t permanent, of course, and eventually, due to natural variability, the storms came back. The tropical season of 2020 was a real doozy. It included 30 named storms, a single-season record for the Atlantic, 14 of which became hurricanes.

What about this year? Well, it holds several distinctions, none of which lend themselves to climate propagandists. For instance, Isaias was the latest first hurricane of the Atlantic season since 1851. That’s 175 years! What’s your explanation for that, Gore, Thunberg, DiCaprio? So far there have been nine named storms, a little below average. Only one, Isaias, has become a hurricane, which is way below average—as in only 20 percent of normal by this point in the season.

And by the way, while Isaias gained Cat 3 status in the Gulf, it had slowed to Cat 2 by landfall. It was the first landfalling hurricane of any strength in the United States in two years, to the day. The year 2025 saw none in the U.S., though there were 13 named storms in the Atlantic and four major hurricanes, including a Cat 5 that hammered Jamaica.

There is an exceptionally strong El Niño in the Pacific this year, which tends to reduce tropical development in the Atlantic through increased vertical wind shear that tears developing storms apart. Some years there’s a La Niña, which has an opposite effect, leading to more tropical development as in the aforementioned wild and wooly 2020 season. Other years it’s somewhere in between.

But we mustn’t forget the influence of the Saharan Air Layer (SAL)—a recurring hot, very dry, dust-laden air mass that forms over the Sahara and is blown westward across the Atlantic, helping to squelch hurricane development. Nor can we ignore the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation/Atlantic sea-surface-temperature regime, which is always lurking in the background and wielding its own particular influence on tropical development.

In other words, keeping up with climate gets insanely complicated. That’s because the atmosphere is an immense, swirling, chaotic entity of a gazillion variables and forces slamming into each other, creating nearly incomprehensible effects. Sorting all that out to conclude that a single storm was caused by climate change is not only impossible, but preposterous.

And yet, Dr. Daniel Gilford of Climate Central has done just that and even taken it a step further. The good doctor is not just a garden-variety climate change cheerleader; his professional specialty is “climate attribution,” which involves quantifying how much human-caused warming changed the likelihood or intensity of a specific weather event. He says so as if such a calculation could be made with any accuracy whatsoever.

But hubris being what it is, Gilford applied his “professional specialty” to Isaias and offered up some numbers. According to him, “unusually warm Gulf waters, exceeding 31°C (88°F), were made 4 to 600 times more likely due to human-caused climate change.”

“Four to 600 times?” Could anything be less precise than “4 to 600 times?” I mean, can you narrow it down just a little? I’ve seen more accuracy come from palm reading. If a palm reader told me I had somewhere between 4 and 600 times greater likelihood of being harmed if I left the house on a given day, I’d be incredulous enough to demand my money back.

There Dr. Doom may have unintentionally spilled the beans about the inexactness of climate change calculations in general. That range is about as laughably inexact as it could be. And if we’re going to use such numbers to address what to do about climate change in terms of our use of fossil fuel energy, should we just tweak the economy and our way of life (4 times) or should we destroy it and return to the Stone Age (600 times)?

The United States is having a gloriously inactive hurricane season that we can all be thankful for, despite supposed anthropogenic climate change that we’re supposed to feel terribly guilty about. But there’s always at least one guy at a party who can’t just have a good time and leave everybody alone. Meet Dr. Gilford, planetary party pooper.