Background
Climate alarmists have long proclaimed that rising global temperatures lead to increases in both the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, such as tropical cyclones. Hence, we are always on the lookout for studies that address this subject; and we here report on the study of Zhang et al., who analyzed these properties of such storms that made landfall on the Pacific coast of South China's Guangdong Province between 1965 and 2007.

What was done
Employing tropical cyclone (TC) data extracted from the database collected by the Shanghai Typhoon Institute of the China Meteorological Administration, together with pertinent sea surface temperature (SST) data for the entire Pacific Ocean that they obtained from the UK Met Office's Hadley Centre, the four Chinese researchers analyzed the changing properties of the frequency and intensity of the TCs making landfall at the Guangdone Province (TMLGP) as functions of time and temperature.

What was learned
Zhang et al. report that the frequency of TMLGP after 1996 had "a nearly opposite trend compared to the period preceding 1996," and as a result, they determined that "the frequency of TMLGP for the period 1965-2007 as a whole is in an insignificant relation with SST in these two periods." They also found that various SST measures "only have a weak influence on TMLGP intensities." And by these means they explain the observational fact that "despite the long-term warming trend in SST in the Western North Pacific, no long-term trend is observed in either the frequency or intensities of TMLGP."

What it means
Once again we have another study that provides no evidence for the climate-alarmist claim that rising global temperatures are leading to more frequent and more intense tropical cyclones in yet another part of the world. In fact, Zhang et al.'s findings provide evidence for the fallacy of that baseless claim.