This comes to us via one of the Washington Post’s hyper-Warmists, Jason Samenow
The U.S. coast is in an unprecedented hurricane drought — why this is terrifying
Hurricanes, large and small, have eluded U.S. shores for record lengths of time. As population and wealth along parts of the U.S. coast have exploded since the last stormy period, experts dread the potential damage and harm once the drought ends.
Three historically unprecedented droughts in landfalling U.S. hurricanes are presently active.
A major hurricane hasn’t hit the U.S. Gulf or East Coast in more than a decade. A major hurricane is one containing maximum sustained winds of at least 111 mph and classified as Category 3 or higher on the 1-5 Saffir-Simpson wind scale. The streak has reached 3,937 days, longer than any previous drought by nearly two years.
We also learn that Florida hasn’t seen a hurricane strike since Wilma. And
Even the entire Gulf of Mexico, and its sprawling coast from Florida to Texas, have been hurricane-free for almost three full years, the longest period since record-keeping began 165 years ago (in 1851). The last hurricane to traverse the Gulf waters was Ingrid, which made landfall in Mexico as a tropical storm, in September 2013.
But, hey, you know what this means?
A study published by the American Geophysical Union in 2015 said the lack of major hurricane landfalls boiled down to dumb luck rather than a particular weather pattern. “I don’t believe there is a major regime shift that’s protecting the U.S.,†said study lead author Timothy Hall from NASA.
Well, that’s one of the excuses. Luck. We’ve heard several others, including that this was being caused by man-induced climate change. And, of course
Adam Sobel, a climate scientist at Columbia University, cautions that the drought in no way invalidates global warming predictions or the expectation that storms will grow more intense in future decades. The “notion that the hurricane drought in the Atlantic has somehow disproved the consensus projections of climate science is wrong, because the drought is still a relatively short-term fluctuation in a single basin, while the projections are for long-term global trends,†he writes on his blog.
See? It’s coming! Even though they all predicted that the big 2005 season would be the new normal.
But, Samenow does have a point: many people will forget just how dangerous tropical systems are, and ignore the danger. It’s easy to say “people aren’t that dumb”, but, heck, even during normal season, there are always plenty of dum
