Comment by matwood

Great article, scientifically written. I wish it was as confident as you are in your conclusion.

> No, we cannot confidently detect a trend today in observed Atlantic hurricane activity due to man-made (greenhouse gas-driven) climate change. Some human influence may be present

> The importance of this distinction between potential causes of AMV for future hurricane projections is clear: if strong man-made aerosol forcing and volcanic forcing were responsible for most of the “quiet period” of Atlantic major hurricane activity from the 1970s through the early 1990s, then a return to this more “quiet” regime in the coming decades may not occur. But if the “quiet period” of the 1970s through early 1990s (as well as the earlier quiet period of the early 20th Century) was caused mainly by internal climate variability, one would expect to return to relatively “quiet” conditions in the coming decades as the climate swings back and forth between more active and inactive Atlantic hurricane periods. This is an important research question that does not yet have a clear answer.

Meanwhile we continue to see stronger storms.

> Another hurricane metric, the fraction of rapidly intensifying Atlantic hurricanes, was reported to have increased since around 1980 (Bhatia et al. 2019), and they found that this change was highly unusual compared with simulated natural variability from a climate model, while being consistent in sign with the expected change from human-caused forcing. Even so, however, their confidence was limited by uncertainty in how well the single climate model used was representing real-world natural variability in the Atlantic region.

We do know for a fact that the ocean temperatures are rising. Also from your article,

> Global surface temperatures and tropical Atlantic sea surface temperatures have increased since 1900 (by around +1.3 ˚C [+2.3 ˚F] and +1.0 ˚C [+1.8 ˚F], respectively), unlike the reconstructed hurricane counts or U.S. landfalling hurricanes. Finally, a number of studies have found that several Atlantic hurricane metrics, including hurricane maximum intensities, hurricane numbers, major hurricane numbers, and Accumulated Cyclone Energy have all increased since around 1980.

But climate science is about studying a complex system, and finding direct causations is hard.

> However, in a 2019 tropical cyclone-climate change assessment, the majority of authors concluded that the recent hurricane activity increases mentioned above did not qualify as a detectable man-made influences (meaning clearly distinguishable from natural variability).

Another study linked recently from climate.gov (near the bottom) https://www.climate.gov/news-features/blogs/beyond-data/2024...

>[R]ecent studies in attribution science show that climate change is causing an increase in the frequency and/or severity of tropical storms, heavy rainfall, and extreme temperatures.

So at the end of the day, it's fine to say there is no smoking gun, but it is absolutely not 'obviously false'. I think your biases are showing.