Climate Change Hype Doesn’t Help: The bigger issue than global warming is that more people are choosing to live in coastal areas

By Ryan Maue in The WSJ. He is a research meteorologist and an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute. Excerpts:

"Although a clear scientific consensus has emerged over the past decade that climate change influences hurricanes in the long run, its effect upon any individual storm is unclear."

"My own research, cited in a recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, found that during the past half-century tropical storms and hurricanes have not shown an upward trend in frequency or accumulated energy. Instead they remain naturally variable from year-to-year. The global prevalence of the most intense storms (Category 4 and 5) has not shown a significant upward trend either. Historical observations of extreme cyclones in the 1980s, especially in the Southern Hemisphere, are in sore need of reanalysis."

"the bigger issue than global warming is that more people are choosing to live in coastal areas, where hurricanes certainly will be most destructive."