No, Hurricanes (aka Typhoons) aren’t getting worse or more frequent

Rather the opposite.

I’ve made tables from my own spreadsheet, using data from our Hong Kong Observatory. The Observatory is well-respected and has been keeping data since the late 19th Century.

CYCLONES

TYPHOONS (AKA HURRICANES)

Definition of “Cyclone"

“Cyclones” (winds > 41kph) encompass “Typhoons” (winds > 118kph), and since the number of Cyclones has kept steady, while the Typhoon number has trended down, this means that on average the speed of Cyclones has dropped, in this area of the Western North Pacific and South China Sea. 

In both cases above, for Cyclones and for Typhoons, the recent two decades of data are below the long term average number. 

I’ve just done the 21st Century, though a glance at the earlier data suggests that it’s basically along the same lines. 

In short, for Hong Kong and the Western North Pacific, typhoons have slightly declined on a trend line and become slightly less severe. 

I don’t know about the Caribbean, and may get around to that in due course. My guess is it’ll show that same trend. 

I came to do this as I was reading an attempted debunk of Michael Shellenberger’s “Apocalypse Never” thesis: that climate events are not getting worse. There’s recent heat spells to deal with of course, but Shellenberger and his side of the argument don’t dispute that maxima and minima are getting higher (minima slightly more than maxima). 

And also what do we mean by “worse”? Do we mean that floods, say, are getting more severe? Or that they cause more death and destruction? If the former, perhaps (though of course arguable), but if the latter, then in all cases, death and destruction since over the last century have dropped by over 90%: 

Annual deaths from natural disasters have declined 95% since 1920

The authors of "Article by Michael Shellenberger mixes accurate and inaccurate claims in support of a misleading and overly simplistic argumentation about climate change", perhaps unwittingly, acknowledge how much they don’t know about climate change impact on weather events, with the chart below from the National Academy of Sciences. Most of the events fall into the “Low” or at best “Medium” level of Understanding or Confidence: 

ADDED: I found an academic article that reported on 1,000 years of typhoon data (!), from 1000 AD to 2000, for Southern China, from the Fang Zhi records, (“semi-official local gazettes"). The most typhoons in that time were in two periods, 1660-1680 and 1850-1880. The article notes:

Remarkably, the two periods of most frequent typhoon strikes in Guangdong (AD 1660-1680, 1850-1880) coincide with two of the coldest and driest periods in northern and central China during the Little Ice Age.

i.e. most typhoon activity doesn’t correlate with the level of industrialisation. AND when the local climate was cooler. I note this here just for interest, not really to make a point. It’s interesting that China can access so much data over such a long period. It brings some perspective to the present narrative that all has gone to hell, only since we’ve industrialised.