No Atlantic Hurricanes By Sept 23

The Atlantic has reached late September without producing a single hurricane — the first season since 1914 to do so.

As of the National Hurricane Center’s latest full-season tally, 2026 has produced six named storms, zero hurricanes and zero major hurricanes. Accumulated Cyclone Energy (ACE), which combines storm strength and duration, stands at just 6.3 — 92% below the 1991–2020 norm for this point in the season.

The average Atlantic season would have produced roughly four hurricanes by now.

Closest came Fay, which peaked just below hurricane strength at 70 mph (113 km/h). But she has now fizzled, with the NHC issuing its final advisory Tuesday, Sept 22.

Not since 1914 has a season made it this far without a hurricane. That year ultimately finished with none at all, as did 1907. In 1905, the first hurricane did not arrive until Oct 8. Records before the satellite era are less certain, as storms over the open ocean could have gone undetected.

The chief culprit in 2026 is straightforward: El Niño. Strong upper-level winds have generated exceptional shear across the Atlantic and Caribbean, repeatedly tearing developing storms apart. Dry air has also worked against development.

We’re seeing an interesting media pivot.

In September 2020, The Washington Post ran the headline: “Hurricanes near U.S. coast forecast to worsen and multiply due to global warming.” The hyperactive 2020 season, it said, could be a “harbinger of the future,” citing modeling that projected increased frequency and intensity of tropical cyclones, particularly near North America:

Six years later, though, with the Atlantic historically quiet, the Post is suggesting that warming might be suppressing hurricanes:

Its Sept 16, 2026 article points to increasing atmospheric stability as a possible additional brake on development: if the upper tropical troposphere warms faster than the air below, rising air and thunderstorms can be inhibited.

While the physics of atmospheric stability is real, the attribution here is another matter. A warmer upper troposphere can suppress convection locally by making it harder for warm air below to keep rising, but 2026 is also seeing a strong El Niño—known to increase Atlantic wind shear and warm the tropical upper atmosphere. Hurricane formation also depends on humidity, shear, instability and temperatures across the wider tropics.

Six years ago, exceptional Atlantic activity was presented as a glimpse of a warming future.

Today, exceptional inactivity is also due to warming.

Before 1979 Became Year Zero

Climate history looked rather different in the IPCC’s own early reports.

Its 1990 First Assessment Report openly depicted a Medieval Warm Period followed by the Little Ice Age.

The accompanying text described roughly AD 950–1250 as “exceptionally warm” across western Europe, Iceland and Greenland.

The IPCC also once presented Northern Hemisphere sea-ice data reaching back to 1972.

It wrote that satellites had routinely mapped sea ice since the early 1970s and reported something not seen on modern Arctic charts: 1972–75 had significantly less sea ice, while just a few years later, in 1978-79, extent had surged substantially (red circle).

Today, Arctic sea-ice graphs commonly begin in 1979.

But that is not the start of satellite observations.

As late as 1995, the IPCC was still stating that neither hemisphere had shown a significant sea-ice extent trend “since 1973 when satellite measurements began.”

As shown, 1979 sits at the high end of the record. It is little wonder the Climatariat starts its charts here.

New Study Turns The Greenhouse Story Upside Down

A new study argues that Earth’s warm surface is primarily a result of convection—not CO2 trapping heat.

Earth radiates to space at an average temperature equivalent to about -18C (0F), yet the surface averages around 15C (59F) — a difference of 33C (59F).

The usual explanation credits that difference largely to greenhouse gases.

Demetris Koutsoyiannis, writing in Geosciences, argues otherwise.

As air rises, it expands and cools. As you move downward through the atmosphere, temperatures therefore increase. This vertical temperature change is called the lapse rate. Koutsoyiannis calculates that if the atmosphere had no such temperature gradient, Earth’s surface would sit near -18C (0F). Apply the observed atmospheric gradient and the surface reaches roughly 15C (59F).

In his framework, that means essentially the entire 33C difference comes from the temperature gradient established by convection.

Longwave radiation still has a role, but the paper argues it maintains this temperature structure rather than creating it.

The same argument is applied to Venus. More strongly so.

Venus’s atmosphere is about 97% CO2, yet temperatures rise by roughly 10.5C for every kilometer you descend through its 60-km-deep lower atmosphere. That alone produces around 630C (1,134F) of warming from the top of that layer to the surface.

Koutsoyiannis says this temperature gradient “fully explains” Venus’s extreme surface heat.

Convection sets the temperature gradient. Radiation adjusts to it.

Climate Attribution Assumptions

First comes the disaster. Then comes the climate attribution. Then come the headlines. The problem, according to researcher Roger Pielke Jr., is that the conclusion is often already baked into the method.

Pielke says he replicated 96 studies from World Weather Attribution (WWA), the influential group behind countless claims that climate change made a flood, heatwave or storm “X times more likely” or “X times worse.”

His criticism is this: the method does not independently prove that warming caused the change. It assumes warming is the relevant driver, then calculates the event against a cooler hypothetical world.

Pielke demonstrated the weakness by feeding the same statistical machinery absurd variables.

Using global temperature against Major League Baseball home runs, the method can seemingly show that 2019’s record 6,776 home runs would have been impossible in the climate of 1900. He also substituted global patent applications into an analysis of extreme Japanese rainfall and produced an apparent fourfold increase in rainfall risk.

Correlation dressed up with a counterfactual does not magically become causation.

The patents didn’t cause the rains.

But the press—and the public it informs—haven’t worked that one out.