Originally Posted by ADL Colin

Are you referring to hurricanes in particular?

It's not clear at all that warmer ocean temperatures (via global warming) will lead to a greater number of intense hurricanes hitting the US. There was a paper published last year that modeled warmer ocean temperatures and it predicts greater shear in the Atlantic/Gulf and thus less intense storms there. The model performed extremely well in backtesting. The same model predicts that there will be more intense hurricanes in other basins though. The paper was written by researchers at the GFDL.

Kerry Emanuel who has written some of the most influential papers on potential hurricane intensity has, for a long time, been a vocal advocate of the view that global warming will cause an increase in hurricane intensity. However earlier this year he published a paper which contradicts this view and now he has pretty much said he is uncertain.

The vast majority of hurricane researchers believe that the recent increase in Atlantic hurricane activity is due to the "tropical multi-decadal signal".