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I think Tom Knutson hasn't seen Al Gore's movie so he has to be wrong..........

Surely a funding cut is in his future....’hate’ science is not approved by the world science rights crowd.

ping

Global warming isn't to blame for the recent jump in hurricanes in the Atlantic, concludes a study by a prominent federal scientist whose position has shifted on the subject.

A brilliant deduction given that the earth has cooled the last few years.

OK, not a climatologist/hurricane researcher, here.

But doesn't it stand to reason that, today, when they've got (I think) two satellites that measure wind speeds and see tropical storms and hurricanes at least every 6-12 hours, that they're going to see whenever they manage to bust some “next-higher threshold”, when they would have missed it in the past?

They're comparing today's counts to “averages” that began accumulating 50 years ago, when they were lucky to get actual measurements (not estimated or extrapolated) every 18 to 24 hours apart (check out the hand-drawn tracks from some of the early years here http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/pastall.shtml, for example http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/archive/storm_wallets/atlantic/atl1958/becky/opltrack/track1.gif). Nowadays, they're calling a tropical depression that goes above 34 knots for 6 hours a tropical storm and giving it a name, or calling a TS that goes above 64 knots for 3 lousy hours a Cat-1 hurricane, and so on for every magic threshold up to Cat-5. They're even posthumously awarding higher status to some storms after the season is over, based post-game analysis, as in http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/pdf/TCR-AL122007_Karen.pdf, with the NHC note that "*Karen was redesignated as a hurricane in the post-season re-analysis".

There's no way that they would've seen these threshold blips in the earlier parts of this “average” period. With increased scrutiny, and the babes at the Weather Channel doing their “I wish it may, I wish it might, become a HURRICANE tonight” cheerleading, it's no wonder that named-storm and category counts would go up (if indeed they really are).

If they really want to establish meaningful trends in storm counts, it would seem that they should break storm records down into periods of similar measurement technology (at least pre-satellite vs post-satellite). Of course then, we'd probably end up with undecipherable “homogenizing” factors, like Hoaxer Hansen is doing with surface temperatures at GISS.