Hurricane fever

Hurricane Wilma is "the strongest hurricane on record". Quick! Blame global warming!

Hurricane Wilma is the "strongest" in terms of the pressure drop in the eye of the storm. Airplane monitoring showed the pressure in the eye of the storm to be the lowest ever recorded, making the storm the strongest ever recorded.

See the problem with that reasoning? How long have we been measuring pressures while the eye was still over mid ocean? It's only since the 60s or so that we've had the ability to go and look.

Attempts to link hurricanse to global warming have been inconclusive. Historical records have shown that numbers of storms haven't changed that much. If anything, hurricanes become fewer in number as temperatures rise. The response, that storms are more intense, also seems reasonable, but:

Since it’s generally agreed by climate researchers that manmade greenhouse gas emissions haven’t caused an increase in the frequency of hurricanes, global warming advocates now claim that manmade greenhouse gas emissions will lead to stronger, or more "intense" hurricanes. Such claims have been made most recently in studies by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Kerry Emanuel (Nature, Aug. 4) and the Georgia Institute of Technology’s Peter Webster (Science, Sep. 16).

Emanuel claimed in his paper that hurricane strength doubled over the last few decades. But as Virginia state climatologist Pat Michaels recently pointed out, if Emanuel’s claim were true, then "the change would be obvious; you wouldn't need a weatherman to know which way this wind was blowing. All of these feuding scientists would have agreed on the facts long ago."

Some years ago, I was reading an article about climate modeling. I think it was in Scientific American. It showed an attempt to predict the largest observed climate change on the planet – the annual variation in seasonal temperatures. It was not a very good fit.

The difference between winter and summer is pretty significant. To compare it with night and day may understate the case. Shouldn't we ask a climate model to give the right answers for changes we know about before we rely on its predictions of changes we don't know about?

In fact, no mathematical climate model has ever been validated against the historical temperature record. So why would anyone believe that climate models can predict future climate with any reasonable certainty?

Show a good fit between "retro-dictions" – predictions of past climate, given only the data existing up to that point, and maybe we'll have a climate model that makes predictions we can trust.