In October, Biden insisted that “nobody can deny the impact of the climate crisis anymore because of Hurricane Helene.”

“Scientists report that with warming oceans powering more intense rains, storms like Helene are getting stronger and stronger,” he said. “Today, in North Carolina, I saw the impacts of that fury: massive trees uprooted; homes literally swept off their foundations, swept down rivers; you know, families that are heartbroken.”

Yet is Hurricane Helene really proof that man-made climate change is making life more dangerous in the U.S.?

The Heritage Foundation special report “Keeping an Eye on the Storms: An Analysis of Trends in Hurricanes Over Time” answers definitively in the negative.

In the report, Joe D’Aleo, visiting fellow in Heritage’s Center for Energy, Climate, and Environment, and Kevin Dayaratna, chief statistician in Heritage’s Center for Data Analysis, break down the data. //

Although hurricanes may not have worsened with climate change, alarmists often claim that tropical cyclones are more destructive now than previously.

Twenty of the 30 most destructive hurricanes since 1900 have hit the mainland U.S. after 2020, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association. Besides Hurricane Katrina, which carried out a devastating $200 billion in damage in 2005, all of the top four made landfall in the last decade. //

Yet this data does not reflect the worsening of hurricanes so much as the population growth and economic growth of the U.S. in coastal areas, D’Aleo and Dayaratna conclude.

For instance, only 1.3 million residents called Miami-Dade County, Florida, home in 1971, living in 473,200 housing units. By 2022, the population had grown to more than 2.6 million, and the housing units had more than doubled, to 1.1 million, according to the Census Bureau.

In 2018, a paper in the journal “Nature Sustainability” put the hurricane damage from previous years into better context by adjusting for increases in wealth, population, and inflation. This graph shows no meaningful trend in hurricane losses, although a general increase in recent years reflects the growing population in America’s coastal regions.