UN Head Offers Misleading Data on Hurricanes and Climate Change

UN Head Offers Misleading Data on Hurricanes and Climate Change
"The United Nations is manipulating statistics to try and prove a causal relationship between the reported increase in carbon dioxide concentrations and the purported increase in extreme hurricane events over the last several decades, focusing in particular on the 2017 Atlantic hurricane season.
“Over the past 30 years, the number of annual weather-related disasters has nearly tripled, and economic losses have quintupled,” UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said at a press briefing on Wednesday.
...The UN is using the familiar logical fallacy of equating statistical correlations with proof of causation. 
...However, the report went on to conclude that it is “premature to conclude that human activities–and particularly greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming–have already had a detectable impact on Atlantic hurricane or global tropical cyclone activity.”
...Moreover, even the statistical correlations may be misleading. 
The report examined records of past Atlantic tropical storm or hurricane numbers (1878 to present), which it found to be incomplete in terms of reported storms prior to 1965.
Reliance on ship-based observations during that period meant that some storms, particularly short-lived ones, were simply overlooked because they had less opportunity for chance encounters with ship traffic.
There were no satellites more than five decades ago to observe and measure hurricanes with the same degree of accuracy as can be performed today.
Even with the sketchier information we do have regarding hurricanes in the latter part of the nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth century, we know that five of the eight seasons with the most major hurricanes since 1851 occurred prior to 1965. 
The strongest hurricane on record to hit the U.S. occurred on the Florida Keys on Sept. 2, 1935.
And while Hurricane Maria was a tragically devastating hurricane to be sure, Puerto Rico suffered an even worse hurricane in 1928.
...“In summary,” the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory report stated, “neither our model projections for the 21st century nor our analyses of trends in Atlantic hurricane and tropical storm counts over the past 120+ yr support the notion that greenhouse gas-induced warming leads to large increases in either tropical storm or overall hurricane numbers in the Atlantic.”..."
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