[Names Ash Housewares]

Wrong last year.
Eventually they will be right if they keep saying it year after year.

[fatnotlazy]

If it does happen, it will all be Bush's fault, ya know. :)

[NormsRevenge]

A manatee swims in a flooded backyard near Kings Bay, June 13, 2006, in Crystal River, Fla. The storm surge from the effects of Tropical Storm Alberto flooded low lying areas in Citrus County. A comparatively slow Atlantic hurricane season will close uneventfully Thursday, more than two months since the last named storm formed and in stark contrast to a record-breaking 2005 season that finished with thousand still homeless along the gulf. Nine named storms and five hurricanes, two of them major, formed the 2006 season. (AP Photo/Chris O'Meara, File)

[ccc_jr]

yawn ... of course next years "el guapo" should change the wind patterns making less hurricanes then expected from the rampant global warming. Meanwhile, in the real world it feels like 1 in NY.

[The_Victor]

And the accuracy of previous predictions give me little cause to trust this new one....

[Retired Chemist]

I'm going to wait to see what the folks from AccuWeather have to say. They got it right for 2006.

[Shermy]

IN reaction to this scary news, Sen. Barbara Boxer released this statement:

WE MUST INSTITUTE GLOBAL CARBON CAP 'N' TRADE NOW!! DEMOCRATS' EUROPEAN PARTNERS DEMAND IT, AND BEING EUROPEAN ARE SMARTER THAN US AND WOULDN'T BE SEEKING TO PULL A SCAM ON US!

[<1/1,000,000th%]

Just like the 50 trillion hurricanes we had last year.

[RetiredArmy]

I seem to remember they blew this year's guesses.

[aShepard]

I wonder if these guys are on the oil company payrolls???

Gotta prop up the futures prices before the offshore rigs face a bad hurricane season.

[Petronski]

How'd he do last year?


LOL

[hophead]

Same wine, different vintage.

[edcoil]

I am stating right now, for the record that with 365 coil tosses, it will land on heads at least 14 times.

[Old Professer]

If anybody's bookmarking, I'm going for 10% less activity than last year and no landfall of hurricane intensity above 100MPH.

[The Old Hoosier]

What were this guy's predictions for 06?

[Rummyfan]

And I predict monkeys will fly out of said experts' butts in 2007. Why not - it has almost the same level of probability.

[Abathar]

I have a 20 sided die, can I play in this game too?

[quark]

The list:
Akaka
Boxer
Chuckie
Dodd
wEbb
Feinstein
haGel
Hillary!
Inouye
Jeffords
Kerry
Leahy
Murray
Nelson

[edsheppa]

Don't know if you all are interested, but Gray's forecasts for 2000-2006 didn't do any better than random forecasts. I got Gray's December forecasts for those years and actual data for 1995-2006 for NHC (I would have got more actual data but for prior years it's more difficult to pull out of the NHC web site). Then, assuming the named storms and hurricanes obey a Poisson distribution, I made a bunch of random forecasts, for each year using the mean of the actual data of prior years.

Gray's forecast for named storms was better ~28% of the time. His forecast for hurricanes was better ~49% of the time. (Better == smaller sum of squared differences)

Obviously the modelling isn't adding much value for Atlantic tropical storm prediction.