Expert: Increase in Hurricane Activity Not a Cycle

Posted on April 11, 2006

The Palm Beach Post reports on a new research paper from Kerry Emanuel at MIT who believes that we are not in a hurricane cycle. Instead, Emanuel believes the culprit for the growing number of storms and the increase in powerful storms is because of global warming. Emanuel doesn't expect a quiet hurricane decade in the next 100 years.

A new, unpublished research paper by Kerry Emanuel at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology torpedoes one of the few comforting thoughts of this storm-racked era: The notion that our current spree of active hurricane seasons is part of a natural cycle that's due to calm down in 10 or 20 years.
Instead, Emanuel says, the culprit is probably global warming.
As a result, "it's unlikely we'll ever see a quiet decade for the next 100 years in the Atlantic," said Emanuel, a professor of tropical meteorology and climate, and author of the respected 2005 hurricane text Divine Wind. "I don't think there's any evidence of anything you would call a cycle."
We still could see some calm years here and there, he said � maybe because of a periodic El Ni�o, which depresses Atlantic hurricanes.
The new paper, co-written with Penn State researcher Michael Mann, promises to stoke a debate Emanuel inspired last summer � when he published research tying global warming to an increase in hurricane strength in both the Atlantic and North Pacific since the 1970s.

Emanuel's theory puts him at odds with hurricane expert William Gray of Colorado State University who told the Palm Beach Post, "I am appalled.... Emanuel, I just don't understand. He's so bright, but he doesn't get it." It wasn't just the incredible number of hurricanes that occured in 2005 but the incredibly intensity of several of them. This was unprecedented and it does suggest that scientists should remain open to multiple theories about what is happening in the Tropics.

HURRICANES