Fact Check: Is Climate Change Making Hurricanes Worse?

With flood waters still high in parts of the southeast from Hurricane Helene, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and Ohio Sen. JD Vance took to the debate stage on Tuesday for the only vice presidential debate of the 2024 campaign season.

Early on in the debate, moderator Norah O’Donnell said, “Scientists say climate change makes these hurricanes larger, stronger, and more deadly because of the historic rainfall,” and proceeded to ask each candidate about their position on climate change.

Executive Director of CO2 Coalition Gregory Wrightstone says O’Donnell is wrong, and joins “The Daily Signal Podcast” to explain why.

Virginia Allen: On Tuesday night, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and Ohio Sen. JD Vance faced off on the debate stage, and one of the topics that came up early on during the debate was that of climate change, and what happened recently in North Carolina, Georgia, Florida, as Hurricane Helene just devastated multiple areas in the Southeast. And what Norah O’Donnell, one of the debate moderators, asked both vice presidential candidates, she said, “Scientists say that climate change makes these hurricanes larger, stronger, and more deadly because of the historic rainfall.”

Well, Gregory Wrightstone is the executive director of the CO2 Coalition. He joins us now to discuss. Gregory, thanks for being with us.

Gregory Wrightstone: Well, good to be on with you again. Norah O’Donnell could not be more wrong about this. …

Allen: Well, I wanted to ask you because you yourself are a scientist. She says, “Scientists are saying that climate change is making hurricanes larger, stronger, and more deadly.” You say you disagree, why?

Wrightstone: Well, it’s not just me that’s saying that. I’m using data from the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, from NASA, even the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change disagrees with her. They all say that there’s been no increase in the big hurricanes.

And I have personal experience here, I weathered the storm from my home in Florida. Actually, we bailed out inland a little bit, but our home at Apollo Beach, we weathered the storm and it was strange where we were, there was very little rainfall, high winds, and it was the storm surge that really was devastating for a lot of the areas. When it made landfall, it was large amounts of rainfall.

But Norah was wrong about that, about climate change, and intensification. Again, NASA, NOAA, IPCC, all would disagree with that.

The best way to look at a long-term record of hurricanes for the United States is land-falling hurricanes. We have confidence going back to 1850, we know every single hurricane that’s made landfall since 1850, because they’re hard to miss. And land-falling hurricanes in the United States have been declining. I’ve looked at that data myself. In fact, the only state that’s had an increase in land-falling hurricanes is Mississippi, and that was just barely.

So, she says a lot of things that are wrong. She says about increasing extreme weather. The U.N. disagrees with her. If you look at the U.N. data, go right to the source, and they show clearly that extreme or natural disasters have been declining by 10% since 2000. So, she had only a few seconds to talk, but she got a lot wrong.

Allen: So, Mr. Wrightstone, if the numbers are declining, what about the severity? Is the severity heating up more?

Wrightstone: Yeah, that’s false. In fact, one of the top scientists, until he quit NOAA, was Christopher Lancey, he estimated that perhaps, he gave them the benefit of the doubt, intensity of hurricanes have increased maybe 1%. OK, let’s just say for the sake of argument that he’s correct. Is anybody going to know the difference between 130 miles an hour and 131? I don’t think so. It’s not going to make one whit of difference.

And again, these are the main administrative organizations that look at things like hurricanes. We know that actually deaths from severe weather have been in decline more than 90% since 1900. Now, bear in mind, that’s a lot to do with better forecasting. If you’re in Galveston and they say, “There’s a Category 5 hurricane that’s going to make landfall in two days, you better get out of there.” So, it’s better reporting. But it just flies in the face of these claims of increasing extreme weather.

What they do is they take every single thing that they can use to tie to climate change and they go, “See, see, see, climate change.”

A great example, I was in the Netherlands in June, the American media at that same time I was in the Netherlands, they were reporting about extreme heat waves in Europe, in Italy, and Spain. Well, I was there for eight days and I had to wear a winter coat every day in the Netherlands. That’s just one example.

They report the hot weather down south, they didn’t report this unusually cold weather to the north. And that’s what they do, they’re trying to link every single unusual, and these things really probably aren’t unusual, event to man’s emissions of carbon dioxide.

In fact, what we find at the CO2 Coalition in my new book, we find that not only is there not a climate crisis, contrary to that we find that Earth’s ecosystems are thriving and prospering, and humanity is benefiting from modest warming and more CO2. Just the opposite of what you’re being told.

And people like me and my colleagues at the CO2 Coalition are regularly silenced. We’re not allowed to present the facts that contradict this notion of a man-made climate crisis. If we were, we could tell a compelling narrative that’s fact- and science-based, and it would be game over for this climate-industrial complex crowd, because we have the science of facts and the data to back us up.

Allen: You refer to mild warming. What would mild warming, what does mild warming do to hurricane season? Does it do anything? Does it have any effect on the severity of hurricanes?

Wrightstone: Yeah, we have not seen that. The data do not support that there’s been any increase. And again, it’s not me, it’s NASA, NOAA, and other scientific organizations saying “no.”

Allen: OK.

Wrightstone: And what we’re doing is, when we talk about modest warming, we’ve increased the temperature using the HadCRUT dataset, which is global. Since about 1850, it’s warmed about 1.2 degrees Celsius.

Now, bear in mind, they’re telling us we dare not let it get to 1.5 degrees Celsius. Well, we’ve already warmed 1.2, so that means that what they’re doing is they’re telling you, “Oh, we can’t let it warm another three-tenths of a degree Celsius, that’s half a degree Fahrenheit.” Think about that. It’s probably changed half a degree in your studio where you’re sitting since we began this interview. A change that small that they’re warning about wouldn’t trigger your thermostats on or off, and if you’re that worried about it, move 17 miles further north and your average global temperature, your average temperature would decrease by half a degree Fahrenheit.

When you look at it in that context, these claims of catastrophe and a tipping point of 1.5 degrees Celsius, it’s ludicrous. And we would normally warm more than that between 10 a.m. and noon on any given day.

So, what they’re doing is they’re grasping onto all of these different things. If a tornado hits, it’s man-made climate change. If a Cat 3 hurricane hits, it’s climate change. If it’s a heat wave in Texas in the summer, it’s climate change.

And so, what they did, NOAA predicted that this would be one of the most intense hurricane seasons ever, despite what we’ve just looked at with Helene, they’ve a long ways to go with a lot more hurricanes to get to where they were predicting.

They may get to the lower end of what was predicted at the beginning of the year, but they don’t want you to remember what their predictions were, or for unprecedented number of hurricanes. What have we had now? Two?

I’m not going to dispute—again, we have tragedy and experienced, just even our own community, death and destruction. I’m not going to disparage that. But what they’re doing is glomming onto this and promoting this false climate crisis, using the deaths of a hundred and something people.

And plus, she said it was unprecedented, one of the largest hurricanes in history. It doesn’t even meet the top 30 of hurricanes. Now, it was tragic. A lot of people died. But if you look in the United States, the largest was the Galveston. I believe there were 120 people killed in Helene here. Again, tragedy, but Galveston killed between 8,000 and 12,000 people. A number of other hurricanes, you’ve got the top 10 I just looked at, there were significantly larger deaths than this.

And again, I don’t want to discount the tragedy and the deaths that we’ve experienced, but what she’s doing is politicizing those deaths in order to promote this false climate agenda.

Allen: Why do you think that so much of the media and really the world has grasped onto that language around climate change? And now there’s a lot of fear, especially, I would say, among young people, around climate change and this almost compulsive, “We need to do something,” because of that fear.

Wrightstone: Yeah, well, they need to instill fear in the minds of the population. And the reason they do is because what they’re doing, they’re proposals, aren’t they? It’s going to be controlling every aspect of our lives. Stripping away our freedoms of choice.

They talk about, “We’re in favor of choice.” Well, they’re not. They don’t want you to choose what kind of vehicle to drive. They don’t want to allow you to choose how to heat or cool your home. They don’t want you to choose what temperature to set it this summer, or the winter …

Allen: And when you say “they,” Mr. Wrightstone, who is “they”?

Wrightstone: Yeah, that’s a good question. I call it the climate-industrial complex, and there’s a lot of people that are involved in this. There’s a lot of people—if your salary depends on promoting a certain agenda, you’re probably going to promote that agenda. And there’s a lot of money to be made in this.

And you’re going to ask me, “Well, why are they doing it?” I can show you very clearly the science disputes most of this radical view, but I can’t see inside men’s and women’s souls to see what their motivation is.

I’ve been told, “Is it money?” Yeah, we know that your funding will be cut off, if you’re in the university. If you promote a scientific study that would in any way dispute man-made climate crisis agenda, you’re not going to get funded. It’s just a fact. And you might just lose your job. We’ve seen that occurring time and time again, people being stripped of their jobs.

Many several members of our CO2 Coalition were professors that were given the ax, and so it’s they need to instill a climate of fear. Why else would we voluntarily give up our freedoms? Again, these freedoms to choose all these things. Why would we do that? Well, we would do it if there’s a true existential threat. There isn’t, and we can show that by, boy, by almost every metric we look at.

Earth’s ecosystems are thriving and prospering, and it’s because of more CO2 and modest warming. The best way to look at is from agriculture. Agriculture production is breaking records year after year after year, and it’s because partly due to warming, we have a longer growing season, which is hugely beneficial.

In fact, in the continental United States, growing season has lengthened more than two weeks since 1900. That’s a good thing. CO2 is turbocharging plant growth. And again, we look from the coldest countries to the hottest, like India, and they’re seeing huge increases in breaking crop growth records year after year after year, and we should celebrate that, not demonize it.

Allen: So, you would argue that CO2 is actually helping the planet?

Wrightstone: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. And again, the greatest way we can look at that is through agriculture, but we actually see vegetation. It’s called the greening of the earth. We see that from every ecological niche, from the near polar regions to the equator, we’re seeing a huge increase in vegetation, and it’s from increasing carbon dioxide. Again, that’s a very good thing.

We see that, for example, the southern Sahara, the Sahel, some 200,000 square kilometers has turned from desert into a lush grassland. They’re growing crops, and plants are growing there, where there just 50 years ago was a desert. And again, it’s attributed mainly to more carbon dioxide. And carbon dioxide also has the benefit of moderating the effects of drought. I won’t go into the scientific reasons why that’s so.

Again, these are really good things, but we’re not allowed to talk about them in public. We must be silenced, and they’re doing a very effective job of silencing, again, me and my colleagues here at the CO2 Coalition.

Allen: In conversations that I’ve had with yourself, with climatologist David Legates, and others that work on this issue, one of my greatest takeaways and understandings has been that there are these natural cycles of warming and cooling that the earth goes through, and there’s indicators of why that might be, but at the end of the day, science is still not 100% sure why those cycles occur in the timeline. Is that a fair analysis?

Wrightstone: Yeah, it is. I like to look back over the last 5,000 or so years of temperature history and human history, and we find that there were three other great warming periods similar to what we’re in right now, but all ended up being much warmer than today. And the key takeaway I want you and your viewers to learn and listen to is that each of those previous warming periods were hugely beneficial. Great civilizations and empires rose up during the really warm periods.

For example, the first was the Minoan Warm Period, the Bronze Age, the Hittites, the Babylonians, the Assyrians, the Harappan Empire in the Indus River Valley all thrived and survived. Life was good, food was bountiful, and then it started getting cold, and things were horrific. What we found, it was called the Late Bronze Age collapse. In as short of a period as 50 to 100 years, all of those empires and civilizations collapsed and led to the Greek Dark Age, it was a very horrible time.

So, each warming period, the Roman Warm Period, Medieval Warm Period, just think life is good, food is bountiful, empires arose, and then it got cold and things did not end up too well.

And so, the warming that we’re in right now, the blessed warming, is lifting us out of the death-dealing cold of what was the Little Ice Age, which was probably the coldest period of the last 10,000 years. Remember, recall Valley Forge and George Washington, that was in the depths of the Little Ice Age, and it was much colder.

For example, if you go down to George and Martha Washington’s home at Mount Vernon, they have an icehouse you can visit. Well, they would send their slaves down to the Potomac every year to cut the thick ice. Well, you’re in that area, you know that the Potomac doesn’t freeze over, and it did, I think, in the 1980s, but it happened every single year. So, that’s one historic fact that we can use to confirm that it was a lot colder at that point.

Allen: Wow. Fascinating. Mr. Wrightstone, I know that you address many of these things, go into detail in them in your books. If you would, share with us, how can we follow your work and get your books?

Wrightstone: Well, my latest book was just published this year a few months ago. It’s called “A Very Convenient Warming: How Modest Warming and More CO2 Are Benefiting Humanity.” So, in this book, I’ve gone beyond there is no climate crisis, and there isn’t, and we can prove that categorically, but we’ve gone beyond that to say that not only that, is life is good and getting better.

I call it the greatest untold story of the 21st century, that of a thriving earth, and a thriving and improvement of the human condition. It’s something, again, I like to use the word celebrate. It’s something we should celebrate the facts, and so you can get those facts at “Convenient Warming.” Search for that. Or go to co2coalition.org to learn the facts about climate change.

Allen: Excellent. Gregory Wrightstone of the CO2 Coalition, thank you so much for your time.

Wrightstone: Thank you.

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