As November comes to an end, the 2023 North Atlantic hurricane season is in the books.
Today, I share updated figures and analyses from our peer-reviewed work on hurricanes1 that summarize the season and place it into a longer-term historical context. [emphasis, links added]
Mainland U.S. Hurricane and Major Hurricane Landfalls, 1900 to 2023
The figure above shows tropical cyclones of hurricane strength (i.e., Category 1+) that made landfall along the Continental United States (CONUS) from 1900 to 2023.
There was one landfall in 2023, Hurricane Idalia in Florida.
The figure above shows tropical cyclones of major hurricane strength (i.e., Category 3+) that made landfall along the continental United States, with Hurricane Idalia in 2023 making landfall as a Category 3 storm.
There are no trends in either landfalling CONUS hurricanes or major hurricanes from 1900 to 2023.
Normalized CONUS Hurricane Damage 1900 to 2023
Hurricane Idalia has, to date, resulted in about $310 million in insured loss claims in Florida, which represents a much lower figure than was originally estimated by catastrophe modelers.
This equates to a total loss of less than $1 billion. 2
The figure above provides an update of our normalized CONUS loss time series to 2023 values — showing an estimate of the damage for each year if hurricanes of the past made landfall with today’s level of population and development.
There is no trend in normalized losses from 1900; however, there is an upward trend from the 1970s.
Given that there has been no increase in landfalling hurricanes or major hurricanes, we would not expect to see any increase in normalized losses. 3
The 1926 season has pushed over $300 billion, and in 2005, over $200 billion.
In the coming months, I will update the global catastrophe loss time series once 2023 comes to a close, but I can tell you now that weather-related insured and total economic losses of 2023 will come in lower than in recent years due to 2023’s lack of significant hurricane impacts. 4
Roger Pielke Jr. has been a professor at the University of Colorado since 2001. Previously, he was a staff scientist in the Environmental and Societal Impacts Group of the National Center for Atmospheric Research. He has degrees in mathematics, public policy, and political science, and is the author of numerous books. (Amazon).
Read rest at The Honest Broker
The mainstream media is a propaganda group for the climate change movement. The media has no trouble with the facts in this article. For each hurricane, the news sensationalizes the event as if it was unprecedented.