Five in the 150 years before 2000. 1 in every 30 years.
Five in the 20 years since 2000. 1 in every 4 years.
Looks like an upward trend to me.
You are comparing inappropriately shorter cycles to longer ones. We're only twenty years into the 21st century for one, and we're talking about record setting storms. You're not looking at all storms.
The number of storms has remained the same since 1880 on average. There is no increase. The increase in observed storms that last less than two days is likely due to better methods of observation, not that they didn't happen at the same frequency in past years.
That's what NOAA says about it.
Existing records of past Atlantic tropical storm numbers (1878 to present) in fact do show a pronounced upward trend, correlated with rising SSTs (see Figs. 1 and 9 of Vecchi and Knutson 2008). However, the density of reporting ship traffic over the Atlantic was relatively sparse during the early decades of this record, such that if storms from the modern era (post 1965) had hypothetically occurred during those earlier decades, a substantial number would likely not have been directly observed by the ship-based “observing network of opportunity.” We find that, after adjusting for such an estimated number of missing storms, there is a small nominally positive upward trend in tropical storm occurrence from 1878-2006. But statistical tests reveal that this trend is so small, relative to the variability in the series, that it is
not significantly distinguishable from zero (Figure 2).
There is no increase in tropical storm activity. You are listening to hysteria and hype, not science.
