AMS Dispatch: Numbers Game

[Tracks of the record 28 named storms of the 2005 Atlantic hurricane season.] Something of a subtle shift may be happening in the ongoing hurricane-global warming debate. This was very much on display yesterday in San Antonio during a panel that featured Greg Holland, director of the Mesoscale and Microscale Meteorology Division of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, and Chris Landsea, science and operations officer for the National Hurricane Center. A year ago, this debate--spurred by two papers in Nature (PDF) and Science (PDF)--centrally focused on the question of whether hurricanes had intensified globally. Holland, a longtime hurricane specialist, was a co-author on the Science paper, which said that the number and proportion of Category 4 and 5 storms had increased up dramatically over the past several decades, but did not strongly attribute this trend to global warming (although it was hard to miss that implication). More recently, though, ...