The Associated Press reports:

The number of tropical storms developing annually in the Atlantic Ocean more than doubled over the past century, with the increase taking place in two jumps, researchers say.

The increases coincided with rising sea surface temperature, largely the byproduct of human-induced climate warming, researchers Greg J. Holland and Peter J. Webster concluded. Their findings were being published online Sunday by Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London.

An official at the National Hurricane Center called the research “sloppy science” and said technological improvements in observing storms accounted for the increase.

In other words, the NHC thinks the storms were always there but they just didn’t have the means to detect them. They didn’t use aircraft to check out storms until 1944 nor have satellites up there looking for storms until 1970, so it seems reasonable to me that some of them could have been missed.

But Kerry Emanuel, a hurricane expert at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, points out that the increases in the number of storms occurred in 1930 and 1995, which is inconsistent with the 1944 and 1970 upgrades in storm detection capability. What Emanuel doesn’t emphasize, though, is that neither can the incremental increases in the number of storms be tied directly to climate change. I’m unaware of any sudden significant increases in the earth’s temperature occurring in 1930 and 1995. In fact, as late as the 70s scientists believed the earth was cooling.

It seems that now any observed change in the earth’s climate is attributed to global warming — whether or not there exists any tangible evidence to support that conclusion. I read that even the trouble in Darfur has been blamed on global warming. Do you think the fact that I can’t keep the grass in my yard cut as well as I used to is due to glowarm?