Study: Hurricanes No Worse Today Than In The Past Says Leading Climate Scientist

"The study has implications for scientists who research whether or not climate change is responsible for increasing the frequency and severity of hurricanes. Pielke suggests that even if climate change does intensify hurricanes, the added damages caused by global warming are relatively insignificant. If people want to see less damage, they need to move away from the coasts, he said."--Roger Pielke Jr., a scientist with CU’s Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences

Not stronger. The reason for more damage? More human inhabitants in vulnerable areas:

If the same hurricane that plowed into Miami in 1926 were to swamp south Florida's coast today, it would cause around $150 billion worth of damage -- dwarfing the $80 billion in losses caused by Hurricane Katrina in 2005 -- according to new research by a professor at the University of Colorado.

The study, published this month in the journal Natural Hazards Review, extrapolated how much damage historic hurricanes would cause given today's denser and wealthier coastal populations. All of the storms that made landfall between 1900 and 2005 were studied.

“We took 2005 population and buildings and wealth and we said, ‘If every hurricane system occurred with that amount of development, what sort of damages would we see?’” said Roger Pielke Jr., a scientist with CU’s Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences.

Pielke and his team found that hurricanes today are not more damaging than hurricanes a century ago. Instead, the main factor causing increased losses from hurricanes is the coastal development pattern.

“It’s not a wise or unwise decision to build on the coast,” Pielke said. “But I would like to see people fully appreciate the risks of their actions and consider who will be bearing the costs.”

The study has implications for scientists who research whether or not climate change is responsible for increasing the frequency and severity of hurricanes. Pielke suggests that even if climate change does intensify hurricanes, the added damages caused by global warming are relatively insignificant. If people want to see less damage, they need to move away from the coasts, he said.

Logic. Lost on moonbats in the globalwarmenist religion. One of the central tenets of the Al Gore conspiracy theory is that human activity exacerbates weather events--especially in the most destructive category of hurricanes.

Unfortunately for the global warming industry, there are scientists more interested in discovering what is actually happening to the Earth's climate--both causes and effects--than belonging to any mythical "consensus".