Climate Alarmism Fails: The 2025 Hurricane Season and the Hollow Promise of Green Energy

The absence of alarming headlines about unprecedented extreme weather events this year—or credible warnings from global bodies on the final chance to prevent climate Armageddon—suggests that mainstream news has been lacking in sufficiently dire reporting.

Recall the predictions of increasingly frequent and severe hurricanes fueled by man-made carbon dioxide “pollution” from oil companies and automakers.

The 2025 Atlantic hurricane season concluded without a single storm making landfall on the continental United States, marking the quietest year since 2015 with an average of about two storms annually.

Although Hurricane Melissa struck Jamaica in late October with 185-mph winds and flooding—drawing attention to climate change—a recent report noted that 12 named storms veered away from the East Coast, leaving only a minor tropical disturbance near the U.S. This pattern was not considered unusual.

Bjorn Lomborg, president of the Copenhagen Consensus and a visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, notes that attribution science often attributes minor warming to negative outcomes while overlooking potential benefits, such as atmospheric shifts steering hurricanes away from land.

A more accurate measure of hurricane activity uses accumulated cyclone energy (ACE), which accounts for storm count, intensity, and duration. While the North Atlantic saw a 9% higher ACE than the 1991-2021 average this year, all other Northern Hemisphere basins—Northeast Pacific, Northwest Pacific, and North Indian—recorded an overall ACE 19% below normal.

The UN’s push for “carbon neutrality” has recently faced setbacks. Its COP 30 summit in Belém, Brazil concluded with a significant reversal of earlier commitments from COP 28 in Dubai, where more than half the nations opposed non-binding pledges to phase out fossil fuels.

Regarding rising oceans, the UN previously claimed they would flood the Maldives, necessitating financial aid from developed countries. Yet, the Maldives’ airport expansion—built on land only five feet above sea level—has proceeded despite these predictions.

A study published in Nature initially forecasted a 62% global economic decline by 2100 under high-carbon scenarios but was later revised down to 23%. The original analysis failed to account for the substantial economic benefits of fossil fuels, which supply over 80% of the world’s energy, or the severe costs of unreliable energy.

Europe claims a 30% reduction in carbon emissions since 2005—more than the U.S.’s 17% drop—but electricity prices have soared across much of the continent. Germany now has the highest domestic electricity rates globally, while the United Kingdom leads in industrial rates.

President Trump’s administration announced plans to roll back federal fuel economy standards known as Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) rules. This would lower requirements from 50.4 miles per gallon for model year 2031 vehicles down to 34.5 miles per gallon, and reclassify many SUVs as passenger cars instead of light trucks—potentially saving consumers over $100 billion in five years.

Additionally, the EPA seeks to rescind its 2009 “endangerment finding,” a determination that greenhouse gases threaten public health by raising global temperatures. This decision would remove regulations targeting carbon emissions from power plants and transportation.

The only true endangerment to public health and welfare results from rising tides of bad government energy policies based on an exaggerated climate crisis narrative, which have inflicted economic harm and strained household budgets.