It has been widely reported that increasing CO2 produces more hurricanes. If that were true, we would expect to have seen an increase in hurricanes as CO2 has risen over the last 100 years. The graph below shows US hurricane strikes in blue, and major (category 3, 4, 5) hurricane strikes in red. The current decade is updated through September 3, 2010.

As you can see, the most active hurricane periods occurred over fifty years ago. Now, lets do a direct comparison between hurricane strikes and CO2.

The plot below shows US hurricane strikes (per decade) vs atmospheric CO2. As you can see, the most active decades occurred when CO2 was much lower.

Conclusion: If there is a correlation between CO2 and hurricanes making landfall in the US, it is the opposite of what is predicted. As CO2 has increased, hurricanes have decreased.

Some of our friends have picked up on this fact and changed their tune. Now they say there will be fewer hurricanes, but more big ones. Again, this is easy to test. The plot below shows the number of major hurricanes (per decade) making landfall in the US vs. atmospheric CO2.

Again, there is no correlation between atmospheric CO2 and major hurricanes striking the US.

The last category five hurricane to make landfall in the US was Andrew in 1992.