In May of 2005, a few months before Hurricane Katrina, I wrote an article that nobody noticed. It was entitled “Thinking Big About Hurricanes: It’s Time to Get Serious About Saving New Orleans.” In it, I talked about how devastating a strong hurricane landfall could be to my home city:

Afterwards, the article was passed around furiously and I was hailed for having some sort of deep insight. I didn’t: The danger was staggeringly obvious and I was only channeling what many experts at the time knew.

This has been a year of dramatic disasters and weather extremes. From tornadoes to droughts to heat waves, the U.S. has been battered.

Unfortunately, the hurricane season that’s about to get firing may not go any easier on us.

Nobody can say in advance where storms are form to strike or whether they are going to make landfall—but everything is lining up for there to be a lot of them in the Atlantic region, and some very strong ones. As you can see from the figure here, we’re just starting the climb towards the peak of the season, which occurs on September 10.

Sea surface temperatures in the main development region for Atlantic hurricanes (pictured above for the Gulf) are the third hottest they’ve been on record. Everything is lining up for there to be a lot of action: 9-10 hurricanes, and 3-5 major ones, NOAA predicts. There have already been 5 tropical storms, but that’s child’s play compared with what’s likely coming.

Our own Chris Mooney was honored this week at the 89th Annual Meeting of the American Meteorological Society. He won the 2009 Louis J. Battan Author’s Award for Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming, dubbed “an accurate and comprehensive overview of the evolving debate on the impacts of global warming on hurricanes that illustrates the complexities of this significant scientific problem.” It’s a compelling book that successfully provides an interesting and honest account of the history of storms and climate science, while taking a serious looks at the players and politics involved.

Mooney is a regular commentator at DeSmogBlog, contributing editor to Science Progress, and senior correspondent for The American Prospect magazine. He has authored three books, New York Times bestselling The Republican War on Science, Storm World, and forthcoming Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future. A founding member of ScienceDebate, he also writes for a variety of news and scientific magazines and blogs at The Intersection.

Congratulations Chris!

While there is no apparent connection between warming and an increase in the number of hurricanes, there is a growing literature — including some half-dozen peer-reviewed studies — which find that warmer surface waters generate more powerful and destructive hurricanes. 

Tropical Storms 50 Percent More Intense since 1970s

Changes in Tropical Cyclone Number, Duration, and Intensity in a Warming Environment   

It is certainly only coincidence that two recent events—the deadly Category 4 landfall of Cyclone Sidr in Bangladesh and the release of the UN IPCC's 2007 synthesis report—have so closely coincided.

But if we take them together—the story of pain and grief in a low-lying region on the one hand; the careful words of scientists on the other—it seems impossible not to attempt a still grander synthesis.

A new study published by Greg Holland of the National Center for Atmospheric Research and Peter Webster of Georgia Institute of Technology has found that the number of hurricanes in the past 100 years has doubled. Altered wind patterns and rising surface sea temperatures (SST's) caused by global warming are the culprits. The team studied hurricane frequency from 1900 to 2005 and found 3 distinct periods in which hurricane activity increased sharply and then stabilized.

Debate does exist however…