Another Big Hurricane Season Coming

The AP carries a story today about the forecast for the coming hurricane season, and of course, carries the obligatory mention of global warming as the probable cause for a more active season:

In what could signal a frightening new fact of life in the age of global warming, Canadian and U.S. forecasters are warning that another major hurricane season is brewing in the Atlantic Ocean.

The 2006 hurricane season officially opens on June 1, and already scientists are telling people living in eastern North America that numerous storms are predicted, with as many as five major hurricanes packing winds of 180 km/h or greater.

"It's kind of comparable to what we were looking at last year at this time," says Bob Robichaud, a meteorologist with the Canadian Hurricane Centre in Dartmouth, N.S.

"Last year we were looking at 12 to 15 storms and this year the forecast is for about 17. No one would go out on a limb and say it is going to be just as bad as last year, but the indications are there that it is still going to be another active season, almost twice as active as normal."

But then they include this paragraph, which would tend to add a little doubt to the global warming angle:

"The Atlantic Ocean remains anomalously warm, and tropical Pacific sea surface temperatures have continued to cool," says Colorado University forecaster Phil Klotzbach, explaining two of the key triggers for hurricanes.

The Eastern seaboard has been locked in an active storm period for the past decade and while these seasons are normally cyclical, no one knows when, or if, the active period will end.

From the 40's through the 80's, hurricanes were in a down cycle and experts were predicting back in the late 80's that the cycle was due to ramp up again, which it did starting in the 90's.

As far as the global warming component, here's a reminder from a previous post that Dr. William Gray, one of the world's foremost authorities on hurricanes, has long held that if global warming was really occurring as promised by environmental activists, the number and severity of hurricanes would actually decrease since global warming would produce conditions unfavorable to hurricane development.

We're in a busy hurricane cycle, and there will likely be some big storms again this year. I just wish the media would start talking to the experts in the study of hurricanes, and quit getting their talking points from environwackos.