From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

We constantly hear that storms are getting worse because of global warming. These claims are not referring to hurricanes and tropical storms, but the sort of storm which hits the UK several times every winter.

These are known as Extratropical Storms. The clown Jim Dale made this very claim again this week after Strom Gerrit. According to him, it is all to do with warm oceans, which pep up these storms. If this was correct, there would never be any storms in the Arctic. But claims such as this show a basic misunderstanding of meteorology; astonishing for somebody who claims to be a meteorologist!

NOAA explain the difference between tropical and extratropical cyclones (ETCs):

Given that the Arctic has been warming in the last few decades, whilst the tropics have changed little, the temperature differentials they talk about are much smaller now, so ETCs should theoretically be weaker. It is TCs which feed off warm oceans, not ETCs.

As I reported the other day, here, the Met Office acknowledge that storms in the UK are not as strong as in the 1980s and 90s:

As a measure of storminess Figure 51 counts the number of days each year on which at least 20 stations recorded gusts exceeding 40/50/60 Kt (46/58/69 mph). Most winter storms have widespread effects, so this metric will reasonably capture fairly widespread strong wind events. The metric will consider large-scale storm systems rather than localized convective gusts.- The most recent two decades have seen fewer occurrences of max gust speeds above these thresholds than during the previous decades, particularly comparing the period before and after 2000.
This earlier period [before 2000] also included among the most severe storms experienced in the UK in the observational records including the ‘Burns’ Day Storm’ of 25 January 1990, the ‘Boxing Day Storm’ of 26 December 1998 and the ‘Great Storm’ of 16 October 1987. Any comparison of storms is complex as it depends on severity, spatial extent and duration. Storm Eunice was the most severe storm to affect England and Wales since February 2014, but even so, these storms of the 1980s and 1990s were very much more severe.”

However it is also worth looking at global trends. This was the IPCC’s conclusion in AR6:

In short, they can find no trends in either the frequency or intensity of ETCs. In particular, in the Atlantic the number of intense ETCs appears to have increased between 1979 and 1990 (a period of global cooling), and then fell up to 2010.

They also noted a poleward shift since the 1980s. Given that Britain lies in the usual belt of these storms, any shift polewards would tend to move storms north, away from the mainland.