Surge In Hurricane Activity Is Only A Return To Normal

Fresh research into Atlantic hurricanes is offering a dash of good news in the context of global warming-but bad news for those in the Caribbean and southeastern United States who live in the path of these mighty storms.Investigators believe the greenhouse effect cannot be blamed for a surge in hurricane activity since the mid-1990s.The downside is this, though: What was thought to an alarming blip in the number of hurricanes since 1995 could well turn out to be a return to the norm.Over the past 12 years, there has been an annual average of 4.1 major hurricanes-storms rating at least three on a five-point severity scale-compared with only 1.5 such storms per year between 1971 and 1994.This sudden rise has caused many experts to ponder if seas, progressively warmed by the greenhouse effect, are to blame.But hurricanes are known to occur in cycles. The task for climatologists is to get a long-term view, enabling them to filter out man-made interference with the climate system from natural factors.The problem, though, is that the reliable observational record for these storms dates back only to 1944, so scientists have to look to other sources to reconstruct the past.Johan Nyberg of Sweden's Geological Survey believes he has found such a source-in Caribbean corals (whose growth is affected by temperature and nutrients stirred up by hurricanes) and in cores of shore sediment, whose layers are built up by wind-whipped storm waves.Nyberg's team has used these indicators, called proxies, to build up a picture of hurricane frequency since 1730."The phase of enhanced hurricane activity since 1995 is not unusual compared to other periods of high hurricane activity in the record," they report on Thursday in Nature, the weekly British science journal."(It) appears to represent a recovery to normal hurricane activity, rather than a direct response to increasing sea-surface temperature."
To read more go to:
http://www.terradaily.com/reports/Surge_In_Hurricane_Activity_Is_Only_A_Return_To_Normal_999.html
As in the days of Noah...