It takes much more than warm ocean temperatures to produce and sustain a hurricane, says Roy Spencer, principal research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and TPPF Fellow.
It’s fashionable to blame stalling hurricanes on global warming. But examination of a weather map of the atmospheric flow at an altitude of 18,000 feet shows the jet stream is pushed farther south over western North America. This kind of natural variation in atmospheric flow is called weather, not climate change. It’s just a roll of the dice. Hurricane-steering currents are subject to whatever the weather happens to be when they arrive at the U.S. coast.