Hurricanes Hardly Happen

Call it the hurricane season that wasn't. Forecasters had predicted that this year would witness one of the most severe Atlantic storm seasons in history, a follow-up punch after a record-setting autumn last year that witnessed 28 named storms. Now the same prognosticators say this season will likely end with only 11 tropical storms on the books, of which only six will have attained hurricane strength. None have threatened the American coast with wide-scale destruction.

Which means President Bush deserves an apology. After Katrina hit, the left lined up to blame Mr. Bush on the theory that the global warming that was supposedly driving more and stronger hurricanes was caused by (wait for it) Mr. Bush's refusal to endorse to the Kyoto Protocol on carbon dioxide emissions, which President Clinton signed but never submitted to the Senate for ratification. The New York Times worked itself into a typhoon on the supposed connection between global warming and hurricane intensity. Germany's environment minister at the time, Juergen Tritten, opined that "by neglecting environmental protection, America's president shuts his eyes to the economic and human damage that natural catastrophes like Katrina inflict on his country and the world's economy."

Well, the global climate turns out to be not nearly so simple. This summer, an article in Science found that hurricanes are not growing more severe after all. Researchers had just been undercounting severe storms before. The latest reduction in the hurricane projection points up how even the effects of warming, whether caused by humans or natural cycles that have played out for millennia, doesn't have a straightforward effect. Ocean warming in the Pacific might actually be alleviating the Atlantic hurricane threat by creating the El Nino winds that appear to be disrupting storm formation.

Earlier this year, 60 prominent Canadian scientists sent an open letter to their prime minister calling attention to the limits of modern climate science in predicting either weather trends or how changes in human behavior will affect those patterns. "Observational evidence does not support today's computer climate models," they wrote, "so there is little reason to trust model predictions of the future." Faulty forecasts of the current hurricane season are a case in point. So are the doom-and-gloom models trotted out in support of Kyoto, the scientists argue. While residents of the eastern seaboard start breathing a little easier, for the time being at least, it's time to give Mr. Bush some credit for keeping America out of a treaty born of questionable science and predictions that may well turn out to be untrue.