This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, August 15th, 2007. I'm Caleb Brown.

Are hurricanes getting worse? And if so, is global warming to blame? Patrick Michaels, a Cato

Institute Senior Fellow in Environmental Studies, says it's Hurricane Hysteria.

Michaels argues that it may be convenient to suggest that hurricanes are more intense and costing more in terms of damage,

but there are some inconvenient truths that blow those claims out of the water. Hurricane activity reached a minimum in the mid-1970s,

and since then strong storms have become more frequent.

The frequency of category 4 and

category 5 hurricanes in the Atlantic and in the Western Pacific, which are the two

most active zones in the world, has gone back to what it was in the 1940s and the 1950s. Now the fact of the matter

is that the Earth's surface temperature started warming in the mid-1970s and so people say,

aha, it warmed up, the hurricanes got worse and people neglect the fact that

they returned to the frequency they were in in the 1940s and 1950s and

that surely wasn't caused by global warming.

Now speaking with some historical context a lot of people said that these storms have been

a lot more destructive in recent years, particularly throwing up a lot of pretty big dollar amounts. Can you speak to that?

Yeah, you know, what the amount of damage to the storm causes is related to its power, to where it hits, and to what it hits.

And we have a tremendous influx of population into our coastal regions.

It's a peculiarly American habit to take all the money we earn in our so-called productive lives

and throw it into a sand dune on a hurricane-prone beach. And by the way, then when the hurricane

comes and watches it away the people of this country rebuild our home for us.

It's a great country isn't it?

Anyway if you adjust for the number of people that have moved to the coast, the number of

...