Great find by Zeke Hausfather.
The current Hurricane drought in the North Atlantic is hardly any refutation of climate change.
The Pacific, where a large El Niño event is playing out, has been extremely active, at one point in recent weeks 3 large storms were stretching across the eastern Pacific.
When hurricane forecasters released their seasonal outlooks in spring 2026, the El Niñobrewing in the Pacific contributed to predictions of below-normal activity in the Atlantic basinbut above-normal activity in the northeastern and central Pacific basins. In early September, near the climatological peak of hurricane season, those spring outlooks were on target, with the eastern Pacific buzzing with activity and the Atlantic notably quiet.
As of September 3, the Northeast Pacific had produced 15 named storms and six hurricanes, well above the norm for that point in the season. The Atlantic basin, meanwhile, laboring under unfavorable wind shear conditions, had produced just five named storms and no hurricanes. El Niño typically enhances hurricane activity in the eastern and central Pacific basins because of the unusually warm water temperatures it brings to those parts of the ocean. It tends to suppress hurricane activity in the Atlantic basin by shifting large-scale circulation patterns in a way that makes it harder to sustain storms there.
Another science denial meme has been that legislation passed against cloud seeding has lead to the dearth of hurricanes.
Also nonsense.
A strong El Niño event has led to a quiet start to the 2026 Atlantic hurricane season. But on social media, posts are ignoring the natural cycle, lauding controversial bills that ban weather modification for the lack of storms in Florida. Scientists have repeatedly said technology capable of creating or steering hurricanes does not exist and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration told AFP that the slow season resulted from meteorological factors forecast months ahead.
“Florida bans cloud seeding. Florida stops getting hurricanes,” a September 13 post on X says, resharing news coverage of the lack of hurricanes forming in the Atlantic basin so far in 2026.
Others — including White House accounts — gave credit to US President Donald Trump for the lack of hurricanes.
“Cloud seeding in the USA was defunded under trump and now (e) don’t get hurricanes in the south,” a September 15 post said.
Additional posts shared a decades-old patent — which AFP previously showed was abandoned — as they celebrated the cloud seeding “bans” for their alleged impact on hurricanes.
In the past two years, state legislatures — including in Florida — did pass controversial bills to block all geoengineering and local weather research programs.
Legislation targeted, among other programs, cloud seeding — a technique that introduces tiny particles into the sky to induce rain over small geographical areas (archived here) — despite a lack of evidence that these efforts impact atmospheric conditions at a large scale.
Additionally, tropical storms start forming far away from actual coastlines (archived here).
“None of the bills passed or agencies defunded have caused the dearth of hurricanes this year,” said Kristen Corbosiero, a University at Albany atmospheric science professor (archived here).
An extremely strong El Niño event and its known effects on the Atlantic Ocean — strong vertical wind shear, dry air, and sinking air — hampered storm formation and intensification in the region, she told AFP in a September 16 email.