More than 28 tropical storms and hurricanes, including Katrina, were spawned in the Atlantic Ocean in 2005. In fact, the season was so extreme that it instigated an ongoing debate: Has climate change made hurricanes fiercer and more frequent? As Chris Mooney relates in Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle over Global Warming (Harcourt, 2007), proponents of both sides of the dispute have had a field day with this question. Yet the danger of extrapolating from a single catastrophic season became clear in 2006, an unusually quiet year for Atlantic hurricanes. Just 10 storms brewed, only two of which became major hurricanes. So what does this mixed record say about global warming?
What it tells us, says Mooney, is that the link between climate change and hurricanes is complicated. As he emphasizes again and again, “global warming did not cause Hurricane Katrina, or any other weather disaster.” On the ...
