HF brings up a good point.

I made the mistake of trying to debate weather & global warming on a football board. Someone had posted a link to an article discussing how Chris Landsea resigned his post in Fall 2004 on the UN Global Climate Change board after Kevin Trenberth, chair of the board, made a statement saying that climate change was responsible for what happened in the 2004 hurricane season and that future years may be just like '04. Landsea said such a remark was ridiculous and off-base, highlighting how politics have become entrenched into the whole debate. The article posted was someone highlighting this as well; then, someone came back with something about global warming that was unrelated, but tried to turn the whole thing into a liberal vs. conservative debate. Needless to say, I shouldn'tve even tried to get in the midst of that.

Essentially, Landsea is right. Sure, global warming is occuring, and steps need to be taken to curtail emissions and the like. But to blame everything on the phenomenon because it's the "cool" and PC thing to do? That's just crazy. Global warming causes El Nino events to be more frequent, for overall moisture amounts to decrease, and for sea surface temperatures to rise in general.

The first results in decreased activity in the Atlantic; we've seen that in 1997 and 1992, among other years. The second isn't favorable to hurricane development (there needs to be low and mid-level moisture); an analysis of water vapor imagery and surface observations confirms that. The third, surprisingly enough, is an inhibiting factor if the temperatures get warm enough, or to about ~31 C. Disorganized convection tends to become spontaneous then, resulting in a canopy of clouds cooling the SSTs and spreading heating over a wide area, resulting in storms being less likely).

Plus, hurricane track isn't dependent upon global temperatures, anyway. It's steered by ridges and troughs that, given generally uniform global temperature increases, are not going to be affected that much. The only potentially "positive" factor to increased development from the global warming argument is the atmosphere's response to heating: increased thicknesses tend to lower surface pressure and raise heights in upper levels, an environment generally favorable for hurricane development. But, the overall effect of this is likely to be minimal, given the relatively slow increases as well as the negating factors previously mentioned.

The key thing to realize is that years like 2004 have happened in the past, long before global warming was a buzz topic, and will happen again. 1933 saw 21 tropical storms, with 5 major hurricanes -- all of which affected land. There could well have been even more storms that year; the database reflects no Cape Verde/early recurving storms. 1992 and 1997 were inactive years, yet in the midst of the debate. The point to all of this is that the comment was made because it sounded convienient and is the likely thing people want to hear.

Trenberth is a respected researcher at the NCAR/UCAR in Colorado on climates and climate variability, but has done little (if any) research into hurricanes. Landsea is one of the foremost experts in the field, working on the Hurricane Reanalysis Project, acting as second author on Bill Gray's forecasts, as well as being a lead researcher at the Hurr. Research Division of NOAA. When it comes to tropical cyclone activity, I'm going to go with the person who is in the field and knows what he is talking about, whether or not it's the "popular" thing to do.

Needless to say, Olaf is well on its way to doing what thousands of other storms before it have done -- becoming extratropical and heading off into the neverlands of the South Pacific Ocean. No Perfect Storm-like evolution here.