Hurricane Ian and Climate Change

Any time we have a significant weather event, we can count on a chorus of folks eager to point that this is a direct result of climate change. The next step, of course, is to lay blame on politicians that don’t toe the line on what, if anything, can or should be done to try to counteract human’s influence may be on the climate. To wit, we get gems like this from Joy Behar on The View:

Let’s set aside whether scoring political points during a natural disaster while people are losing their homes and lives is in good taste. Instead, let’s go to the data. Similar to my last post, I’m taking data published from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. We’ll take a look at average temperatures by month since 1895 in FL. Yes, I recognize that climate & hurricane formation are far more complex than simply looking at FL, nevertheless it should be a good proxy about how temperatures have changed in that area of the world. I’ve grouped the months into seasons (Dec-Feb, Mar-May, Jun-Aug, Sep-Nov) and plotted the overall trend line for each season:

As seen above, the season with the most warming is Winter with a trend of 0.2 degrees Fahrenheit per decade. Spring has seen the least increase at 0.14 degrees Fahrenheit per decade. So, according to Joy Behar’s logic, because Ron Desantis is not serious about climate change and therefore missed the opportunity to prevent less than 1/10th of 1 degree of warming (he’s been governor for 3 years), he has some culpability for the severity of Hurricane Ira?

Addendum

As in the last post, looking at the data when we include zero on the y-axis also is interesting

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