The claim is common that global warming is generating more and stronger hurricanes. (And other tropical cyclones. Technically, as Paul Homewood points out, these storms are called hurricanes when they develop over the Atlantic or eastern Pacific Oceans, cyclones when they form over the Bay of Bengal and the northern Indian Ocean, and and typhoons when they develop in the western Pacific.) Is it true?

Not according to the empirical data. Those show that there has been no significant upward trend, when accounting for the magnitude of annual variation, in the frequency or intensity of tropical cyclones in any part of the world through the modern warm period.

Paul Homewood summarizes the data in a new paper released by the Global Warming Policy Foundation. Raw data without much discussion is at Ryan N. Maue’s “Global Tropical Cyclone Activity” page. A particularly telling graph there is this:

Last 4-decades of Global and Northern Hemisphere Accumulated Cyclone Energy: 24 month running sums. Note that the year indicated represents the value of ACE through the previous 24-months for the Northern Hemisphere (bottom line/gray boxes) and the entire global (top line/blue boxes). The area in between represents the Southern Hemisphere total ACE.
1970- September 2017 monthly ACE Data File (Maue, 2010, 2011 GRL)
1970- Sept 2012 global tropical cyclone frequency monthly Data File

Homewood points out that the up-and-down cycles fit well with ocean current cycles but not with changes in global average temperature or atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration.