by Gary Alexander
December 9, 2025
“Potent Storm Is Expected to Drench the Pacific Northwest – A ‘very impressive’ source of moisture from an atmospheric river… is forecast on more than a dozen rivers in Washington and Oregon.”
– New York Times, December 6, 2025
In the Pacific Northwest, where I live, we were warned of high winds and rains and possible flooding this weekend. In most regions, it didn’t happen. Skies were generally clear. False alarms happen quite often. I can’t know this in advance, but I’ll bet the actual outcome in most areas will be far lower than these fears. I’m sure we will see televised examples of storm damage and flooding, but that is not the norm. Most families and homes in our region will be untouched by any storm damage. No great drama there.
We’ve seen such warnings before. Back in 1990, Dr. Iben Browning predicted that a massive Southeast Missouri earthquake would hit on December 3, 1990 – 35-years ago. I was part of spreading this panic, as Dr. Browning spoke at our New Orleans conferences, which I helped to host. His warnings convinced many to stockpile food or even flee the region that week. As December neared, the National Guard held earthquake drills, and state Offices of Emergency Services circulated earthquake preparation guides.
Dr. Iben Browning died on July 8, 1991, sadly disgraced for his failure, and that’s when I grew tired of making or circulating doomsday predictions that failed to happen. That non-quake event was the straw that broke this bear’s back, so I founded a whimsical organization, Apocaholics Anonymous, for those of us addicted to Doomsday fears that failed to occur. I also became a perma-bull and began to grow in net worth. From that earthquake false alarm, I learned that the fear of catastrophes can cause more problems than the catastrophe itself. Still, to this day, warnings of storms or natural disasters are popular postings.
Three Current Examples of False Fears – Each One Limiting Our Profit Potential
Here are three-cases of failed fears from recent news, each impacting economic growth: #1-The 2025 Hurricane Hiatus, #2-Failed Climate Fears, and #3-The “Broken Window Fallacy” at Home Depot.
#1: The 2025 Hurricane Hiatus: Last week’s news revealed that 2025 has been the quietest hurricane season since 2015, with no major high winds reaching the U.S. mainland. This continues a two-decade span of sub-par hurricane hits after the Gulf Coast suffered three killer hurricanes in 2005 (Katrina, Rita and Wilma) and 2005 generated more scare rhetoric, as climate Cassandras predicted Katrina’s deadly attack marked the start of the worst hurricane era ever, “the beginning of sorrows,” in Biblical terms.
But it didn’t happen that way. Over the last two decades we’ve seen far fewer deaths and lower levels of damage, adjusted for inflation, population and greater home density in Florida and other target zones.
Graphs are for illustrative and discussion purposes only. Please read important disclosures at the end of this commentary.
Bjorn Lomborg commented in The Wall Street Journal following this report, saying that perhaps climate changes have made hurricanes less likely to hit the U.S. (see “Climate Change Might Have Spared America From Hurricanes,” WSJ, December 3, 2025), but that doesn’t fit the Doomsday scenario.
The 2025 Atlantic hurricane season officially ended November 30. Of the first 12-named storms that approached North America this fall, all avoided slamming the U.S. East Coast. The well-publicized 13th Hurricane Melissa hit Jamaica hard, causing 100-deaths, so that satisfied the chronic catastrophe crowd.
#2: Failed Climate Fears: A longer-term trend is the fear of global warming or its more neutrally-named cousin, Climate Change. This has investment implications – especially in this column, called “Growth Mail” – since one of the most often quoted climate warnings last year, in Nature Magazine, was that we would see a massive (60% or more) slowdown in global economic output by 2100 due to climate change.
Last week, The New York Times reported that Nature had withdrawn this article as being “fatally flawed” in its methodology. The 2024 article, titled “The Economic Commitment of Climate Change” (in Nature) contained errors “too substantial” for a mere correction, according to its authors. That retraction comes long after this popular (even viral) study predicted that economic output would fall by multiple trillions of dollars (62% by the end of the century) if drastic anti-fossil fuel actions weren’t taken now, or soon.
The article was so influential that its widespread citation led the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF), Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and even the Vatican and our Federal Reserve to call for sweeping actions to voluntarily cripple current economic growth, in order to prevent a later disaster.
The authors never fully explained why slight warming would kill growth or food output – warming will likely expand food growing regions. It turned out these scientists wandered out of their lane in trying to forecast economics. We who follow the economics profession can’t fathom how any expert can predict the impact of slow-moving trends 75-years later. Would scientists in 1900 predict the annual increase of horse manure in city streets into infinity by 1975? If so, they would have been equally short-sighted.
While this popular paper reflected “settled science” in 2024, we can now see that most of the “evidence” they cited came from economic data in one country – an economic pygmy, the moribund economy of Uzbekistan – during a long-ago study of data from 1995 to 1999. If the authors merely ignored that land-locked land, the 2100 damage fell to -23% rather than -62%. So much for “settled” science!
#3: Home Depot’s “Broken Window Fallacy.” We also heard recently that hurricane damage is somehow “bad news” for some home-repair businesses. Specifically, Home Depot cut its full-year profit forecast and missed Wall Street’s earnings expectations for the third straight quarter because it saw weaker home improvement demand stemming from “lower-than-usual storm activity.” HD’s CEO Ted Decker said on the company’s earnings call that the primary driver of their recent earnings deceleration was the lack of storm activity, which traditionally results in rising sales volume for home repair purchases at the Depot.
Economists would immediately recognize HD’s excuse as an instance of the “Broken Window Fallacy,” in which short-sighted economists claim broken windows fuel the employment of glaziers for their repairs, hence boosting GDP. This is the same circular reasoning which says, “Wars are good for the economy.” Smarter economists deal in trade-offs, since spending on repairs will replace unseen, unused spending of these same resources on new building, research, or other positive growth choices, not repairs.
Some Refreshing Positives About Winter – 12-Days Before Winter Even Begins
Here in Western Washington State; winter comes early. In the Eastern half of the nation, the coldest month is January and the coldest 15-days in the northern tier are January 16-31 – right around NFL playoff games and Inauguration Day – but due to some regional differences, December is the coldest and windiest month in our area (see the purple areas, below). Our winter is basically over by Groundhog Day.
Let me shatter some other weather myths: Seattle’s rainfall is about average for the nation, and we only get half Seattle’s rain in our islands up north. Here’s another myth: ‘It’s darkest right before dawn.’ Nope, I get up well before dawn and I see gray threads of light long before dawn, versus. the inky black of midnight.
Another piece of good news is that December in the market is great, but it often delivers two-opposing halves. The first-half is often flat or down, while the second-half features a strong Santa Claus rally:
Graphs are for illustrative and discussion purposes only. Please read important disclosures at the end of this commentary.
Dark days turn bright, as sure as daylight hours will soon expand – and the stock market anticipates that.
Navellier & Associates; do not own Home Depot (HD), in managed accounts. Gary Alexander owns Home Depot (HD), personally.
All content above represents the opinion of Gary Alexander of Navellier & Associates, Inc.
Also In This Issue
A Look Ahead by Louis Navellier
2026 Is Shaping Up to be a Spectacular Year
Income Mail by Bryan Perry
“Affordability” Takes Center Stage For 2026
Growth Mail by Gary Alexander
Storms Make the News, but Clear Skies are the Norm
View Full Archive
Read Past Issues Here
Global Mail by Ivan Martchev
New All-Time Highs Are Likely This Week
Sector Spotlight by Jason Bodner
Into Each Month Some Rain Must Fall
Guest Column by Jamie Dlugosch
Opening Bell Arbitrage – The True “Value Cycle”
About The Author
Gary Alexander
SENIOR EDITOR
Gary Alexander has been Senior Writer at Navellier since 2009. He edits Navellier’s weekly Marketmail and writes a weekly Growth Mail column, in which he uses market history to support the case for growth stocks. For the previous 20-years before joining Navellier, he was Senior Executive Editor at InvestorPlace Media (formerly Phillips Publishing), where he worked with several leading investment analysts, including Louis Navellier (since 1997), helping launch Louis Navellier’s Blue Chip Growth and Global Growth newsletters.
Prior to that, Gary edited Wealth Magazine and Gold Newsletter and wrote various investment research reports for Jefferson Financial in New Orleans in the 1980s. He began his financial newsletter career with KCI Communications in 1980, where he served as consulting editor for Personal Finance newsletter while serving as general manager of KCI’s Alexandria House book division. Before that, he covered the economics beat for news magazines. All content of “Growth Mail” represents the opinion of Gary Alexander
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