Andrew Revkin

You can see this every year.

When that's active, it stifles these big storms at the point right in their nursery.

They all form, there's this area for hurricanes off of West Africa.

That's like the nursery zone.

And so if you're stifling those hurricanes because of pollution in Europe before the Clean Air Act kind of cleanups, and then that goes away.

None of that has anything to do with global warming.

It's another kind of forcing in the climate system, a local one that created a regional dynamic that created a quiet period when all these friends in the bar, maybe they were born in the 90s or whatever, they grew up in an area of like, you know, hurricanes weren't a big deal.

And now we have an end to that drought because we cleaned up the air pollution, the sooty kind of air pollution, sulfur-y, and

Anyone who says global warming, global warming, without saying, well, that's in there too, is kind of missing that.

And when you look globally, there's still, I think, was it 90 or so hurricanes a year, cyclones, hurricanes, typhoons, globally.

That hasn't changed.

The number of these tropical storms that reach that ferocity has not changed.

It's just a fundamental dynamic of... And by the way, on the long time scale, the models...

still indicate as you warm the planet, and remember the Arctic warms quicker.

This is something people probably understand.

You're actually evening out the imbalance between the heat at the equator and the cold in the northern part of the hemisphere.

And that calms the whole system down.

So there could be fewer hurricanes later in the century because of global warming.

And for me, that's a lot of information, but if I'm in a bar,

I start with what do you care about?