In the wake of the Sandy disaster, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and former Vice President Al Gore stated that the massive flooding across the eastern states was caused by global warming. There is a slight problem with this widely publicized claim. The national weather records gathered over the past 130 years show no correlation between higher average temperatures and stronger hurricanes. Nor did Sandy, despite its path of destruction and resulting hardship, come close to making the list of America’s greatest storms.

The misdirection from the New York mayor’s office, however, did divert media scrutiny and public concern from more urgent issues, including the inherent risks of zoning residential developments on low-lying beachfronts and estuaries, a general lack of community evacuation drills and emergency back-up systems, and the unreliability of radiation-release data from several nuclear power plants hit with flood damage.

Passing a Fable as Fact

Average mean temperatures worldwide are gradually rising, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). “The average combined global land and ocean surface temperature for September 2012 tied with 2005 as the warmest September on record, at 0.67°C (1.21°F) above the 20th century average of 15.0°C (59.0°F).”

The easy logic ­ and erroneous rush to judgment - is that global warming caused the destruction wrought by Sandy. More than a century of weather records, however, reveal no parallel rise in hurricane strength, as measured by wind speeds, drop in barometric pressure and dimensions of the storm front. Not a single storm in the past 23 years made the Top Ten lists of most powerful U.S. hurricanes.  Hugo 1989, which came in tenth place, was the most recent of the big blasters.

The strongest storms since 1880, when national data was first collected, were the three Category 5 hurricanes, in descending order: Labor Day 1935, Camille 1969 and Andrew 1992.  Repeat{ the Depression-era hurricane was more powerful than anything since.

Among the worst “people-killer” storms, Katrina with its 1,200 fatalities is the only storm in recent times to make the Deadliest Top 10, which is led by Galveston 1900 (8,000 dead) and Lake Okeechobee 1912 (2,000). In contrast, Sandy’s death toll was double-digit. (This is not to diminish the human tragedy, but only to get the facts straight.) For all the media hype about the “Frankenstorm,” Sandy didn’t even rate as a hurricane when it made landfall on the Delaware shore. It can be safely concluded there is no cause-and-effect relationship between climate change and hurricane strength. Bloomberg and Gore got it all wrong.

Riders on a Storm

Compared with any decade before or since, the 1960s experienced the largest number of intense hurricanes, led by Category 4 Camille, Donna and Carla. The storm activity over those 10 years provided a clue as to what force actually increases hurricane strength. The tendency of climate scientists to focus on the mechanics of heat energy has led many of them to overlook the role of electromagnetism in forming hurricanes and tornadoes along with cyclones in the Southern Hemisphere

Storm clouds consist not only of evaporated water, but are also a mix of salts, organic molecules and microorganisms. Metal particles, in the form of dust or ionized salt, are especially active in the condensation of droplets, as shown in the use of silver compounds in seeding clouds to make rain. Under purely natural conditions of the prehistoric past, metal was ejected into the atmosphere  by volcanoes, transported in evaporation from the ocean’s surface or by the vaporization of a meteorites. Human activity over the past century has vastly increased the concentration of airborne metals.

How was metal airlifted into the atmosphere during the peak hurricane decade of the1960s? World production of steel and copper soared after World War II, resulting in vast amounts of metal dust being ejected into the atmosphere from the blast furnaces of steel mills, copper smelters and coking plants (unfiltered coal smoke contains metals). The growing number of cars also spewed out metallic emissions along with greenhouse gases.  Then from the late 1950s, atmospheric nuclear test blasts shot particles of high-energy uranium, plutonium and beryllium into the skies.

Metal particles inside water droplets act as a catalyst for stripping electrons from the Earth’s surface and promoting the spiraling updraft that eventually becomes the hurricane vortex. Air pollution containing metallic impurities is therefore far more likely to increase hurricane strength than any slight increase in global temperature.

Playful Zephyrs, Deadly Dervishes

The gusts of hot air blowing out of the mayor’s office do not change the meteorological fact that Sandy was nowhere near being the greatest storm ever, even though it caused havoc in and around the Big Apple. The weather data from more than a century of readings shows that his comments were fictitious and completely out of order.

The mayor's pontifical certainty about climate change as the source of all evil in our times can be taken as an endorsement for the nuclear industry, which has the chutzpah to present itself as a provider of "green-energy".. Back in the real world, the storm surge bolstered by high tides awoke Americans to the possibility of a meltdown similar to the catastrophe at Fukushima. Throughout the Sandy crisis, the mayor has been noticeably silent on the storm damage at six nuclear plants along the East Coast, including shutdowns at Entergy’s Indian Point and Exelon’s Oyster Creek in New York State. If the nuclear industry’s track record and government complicity in past cover-ups provide any indication, then New Yorkers had better start purchasing dosimeters to collect more reliable data on their own.

Instead of casting blame on this or that demon, we have ourselves to blame for not heeding the advice of the carpenter who urged everyone to build our homes on rock instead of sand. Hurricanes are not evil conjurations. They just happen and man gets in the way.

As seen though a telescope on the surface of gas planet Jupiter, the procession of swirling dervishes parallel to its equator is one of the masterpieces of Nature’s art. In the transparent skies of Earth, the ceaseless ballet of the wind becomes visible only as hurricanes and tornadoes, dancing in sync with our home sphere’s rotation and orbit. Terrifying, awesome, restless, ephemeral and in serene moments beautiful, these great storms demonstrate our species’ puny capabilities, even when belligerently amplified by nuclear power and all those technical gizmos, against the grandeur of the Cosmos.

Yoichi Shimatsu, a science and environment writer based in Hong Kong, is former editor of The Japan Times weekly edition, who is active in promoting herbal therapy against radiation in Fukushima. His team of volunteer environmentalists over the past five years have sequestered carbon dioxide as charcoal with self-built kilns in northern Thailand and the western Gobi Desert.