Apparently acting on the principle that you never let a good crisis go to waste, the Washington Post on October 18 published a breathless story titled “In North Carolina, hurricanes did what scientists could not: Convince Republicans that climate change is real.”

Tracy Jan, a young reporter covering “the intersection of race and the economy,” which obviously qualifies her to write about the complexities of global climatology, led her story this way:

It took a giant laurel oak puncturing her roof during Hurricane Florence last month for Margie White to consider that perhaps there was some truth to all the alarm bells over global warming.

“I always thought climate change was a bunch of nonsense, but now I really do think it is happening,” said White, a 65-year-old Trump supporter, as she and her young grandson watched workers haul away downed trees and other debris lining the streets of her posh seaside neighborhood last week, just as Hurricane Michael made landfall 700 miles away in the Florida Panhandle.

Storms have grown more frequent — and more intense — over the 26 years she and her husband have lived in Wilmington, White said, each one chipping away at their skepticism. Climate change has even seeped into their morning conversations as they sip coffee — ever since the neighbor’s tree came crashing onto their home and property, coming to rest along nearly the entire length of their driveway.

But it’s notoriously bad science to base claims about long-term trends, whether global or local, on individuals’ memories of local occurrences. Memories don’t substitute for carefully archived data, and local events are weather, not climate. For increased hurricane frequency or intensity to serve as evidence of anything global, the data must be global, not local, and long-term, not short-term. But the global, long-term data show no significant uptick in frequency or intensity of hurricanes. Here’s a relevant excerpt from climatologist Roy Spencer’s forthcoming book Global Warming Skepticism for Busy People, which Cornwall Alliance hopes to publish next month if cash flow permits (good reason for prayer!):

For hurricanes, there are large fluctuations in global activity from year to year and decade to decade, with no obvious long-term increase:

Only if we look at the strongest hurricanes (over 96 knots maximum sustained wind speeds) is there some evidence of a long-term upward global trend, maybe 10% in the last 40+ years, but it is unknown whether this is just a statistical artifact of very noisy data, long-term natural variability, or human influence.

In the U.S., there is evidence from Gulf of Mexico coastal lake bottom sediments of super-hurricane storm surges 1,000 to 3,800 years ago that have not been rivaled in the modern historical record. The strongest hurricane to strike New England occurred on August 25, 1635, only fifteen years after the Mayflower arrived and the Massachusetts Bay Colony was established, with 14 to 22 feet of storm surge. Few people are aware of this epic meteorological event, yet millions of people know of relatively weak (Category 1) Hurricane Sandy, which hit New York City and Long Island (a densely populated area) from the worst possible direction and at the worst possible time (high tide), doing major flood damage with a total water surge of 14 feet at Battery Park.

The 2017 Hurricane Harvey flooding disaster in Houston was not the result of global warming, but of an unusually slow-moving tropical cyclone centered over a major metropolitan area that has experienced extensive land subsidence of 3 to 9 feet, reducing the ability of rivers to quickly remove the excess rainfall. If we examine all major (Category 3 and higher) hurricane strikes in Texas since 1870 and how they compare to the warmth of the Gulf of Mexico waters, we find that half of them have occurred when water temperatures were below average, and half were during above-average water temperature:

Thus, it would be difficult to claim that warming of the Gulf of Mexico is causing major hurricanes to become more frequent along the Texas coast.

Florida also had a major hurricane strike in 2017 (Irma), but again we find that the long-term trend does not support alarm. The number and intensity of major hurricanes have, if anything, gone down in Florida:

The media coverage of Hurricane Irma was breathlessly apocalyptic, yet where were the media reports that 2017 represented the end of an unprecedented 11-year hiatus in major hurricane landfalls for the U.S.? If it isn’t a disaster, it’s not news. This is why we need to examine objective evidence before we believe the claims of journalists operating on deadlines.

The only evidence I’ve seen of a long-term change in severe weather (which is still uncertain) is that there might be some evidence for an increase in the frequency of the heaviest rainfall events. This remains uncertain because the increase might just be the result of a change in rainfall measurement technology in the early 1990s. Nevertheless, to the extent there has been some warming, one would expect a shift toward somewhat more precipitation.

But Ms. Jan isn’t finished. She writes, “While President Trump continued this week to deny the effects of climate change in the face of overwhelming scientific agreement that it is occurring — most recently noted in a landmark United Nations report that he has dismissed — a discernible shift appears to be occurring among Republican voters in North Carolina, a state pummeled by two hurricanes in two years.”

Oh, shiver me timbers! Two hurricanes in two years in North Carolina!

Except:

1. Michael wasn’t a hurricane by the time it reached NC; after traveling some 700 miles over land, it was simply a post-tropical storm with heavy rains, which is pretty common.
2. Since records began in 1857, North Carolina has been hit by 2 hurricanes in 2 consecutive years 14 times, and in 3 consecutive years 5 times, and in 4 consecutive years once: 1878, 1879, 1880, 1881, 1933, 1934, 1953, 1954, 1955, 1984, 1985, 1986, 1998, 1999, 2003, 2004, 2005. Six of those pairs, three of the trios, and the only foursome occurred long before human activity could be blamed for global warming, even according to the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
3. In fact, NC was hit by two hurricanes in the same year nine times, in 1861 (obscured in the Wikipedia table by the misplacement of the September one to after 1944), 1893, 1899, 1933, 1944, 1955, 1996, 1999, 2004—all but three of them before significant manmade warming.
4. And to top it off, three hurricanes hit NC in the same year, in 1954—again before human activity could have contributed significantly to global warming.

Even if North Carolina had experienced more frequent or more intense hurricanes in recent decades, and even if it were widely understood that a warmer atmosphere would lead to more frequent and intense hurricanes (and many climatologists think the reverse because greenhouse warming occurs more at the poles than the equator, reducing the temperature difference and hence the need to cycle heat from equators to poles), that wouldn’t be evidence of manmade global warming. The reasoning here commits the logical fallacy of affirming the consequent: “If Jane shoots George through the heart, George will die. George dies. Therefore Jane shot George through the heart.” What if George died for some other reason? Here we have, “If man is causing global warming, and if global warming will cause more frequent and intense hurricanes, then there will be more frequent and intense hurricanes. There are more frequent and intense hurricanes. [Remember, that’s not actually true.] Therefore man is causing global warming.” But what if the more frequent and intense hurricanes have some other cause—such as the natural variability clearly observed in decades, centuries, and millennia before any allegedly manmade warming?

Moral of the story: Don’t trust a young reporter on “the intersection of race and the economy” to get the science of climate change straight. And don’t trust the Washington Post, either.