Global Climate Change and Hurricane Prediction

I just spent an hour doing something I normally skip: I participated in a comprehensive webinar from Schneider Electric on the annual hurricane prediction.  The bottom line is that their chief scientist is expecting an average year for 2013.

But even that raises a question: what is average?  Over the last 100 years, there have been an average of 11 named storms per season, and each of 2010, 2011, and 2012 brought us 19 – almost twice the average amount.  So is 19 the new average?

The most interesting point to me, though, was that this guy was extremely cautious on the subject of global climate changes as a driver of increased number and intensity of hurricanes. He did allow, however, because I asked this specific question, that hurricane Sandy would not have caused its damage had it not been for the extreme high-pressure system over Greenland that clearly resulted from the warming of the arctic.

But he referred to this as a “technicality,” I presume to draw the distinction between that and the build-up of heat energy and moisture content that we normally associate with global warming and its relationship to these horrific storms. For some reason, he was totally non-committal on this – almost as if this subject has taken on some political import that he needed to avoid.  You don’t think???