Hurricane Season Starts

**Editor's Note: May was an unusually quiet month for Caputo's Corner...as has been well documented.  We fully intend to resume our ordinary blogging capabilities for the month of June...especially once school lets out.  I know I've been saying this for a while, but I really do mean it.  I don't forget about my reading public :-)...end Editor's Note**

June 1 is the official start of the Atlantic basin hurricane season (the Eastern Pacific season starts in May).  As usual, the meteorological eggheads have predicted an "above average" season with more named storms, more hurricanes, more major hurricanes, and more landfalls than ever before.  Accuweather says so...and of course as we all know, Accuweather knows all, right?  Well, earlier this spring, Accuweather's hurricane guru, Joe Bastardi, mysteriously left the company for rival website Weather Bell Analytics.  Bastardi's track record when it comes to hurricane prediction has been very accurate for several years.  However, he (along with most of the weather prediction world) overestimated last year's hurricane season.  It happens.  Sometimes you get one wrong.  Mostly everybody missed last year.  So why did he leave? 

If you follow Bastardi's work, you probably know that he is a very outspoken skeptic of human induced global warming/climate change/whatever you want to call it.  His prediction of a potent hurricane season in 2010 had nothing to do with any of those things.  He based his forecast on prevailing winds off the coast of Africa being favorable for development at the peak of the season.  For a while he was right, but then the African wave train shut off, leaving us with a below average season.  Any time somebody asks him whether or not he feels like global warming/climate change is supposedly increasing the amount of hurricanes because the oceans are warming along with the atmosphere, he gives them an emphatic NO.  Oceans warm every year.  That's what they do.  There's a lot more that goes into hurricane forecasting than just sea surface temperature.  In fact, he argued that if the earth was in fact warming, it would actually REDUCE the number of hurrricanes because the temperature contrasts between ocean and atmosphre would not be large enough to induce the strong convection necessary to build thunderstorms that form the core of hurricanes. 

Well, popular opinion being what it is, the global warming/climate change argument is what people want to hear nowadays.  Hard data just doesn't cut it any more.  It's all about political expediency, even in the weather prediction world.  For Mr. Bastardi, he decided enough was enough.  If Accuweather wants to push the global warming/climate change angle with its long-range forecasts, he will go somewhere where he can rely on data.  Now, I don't know much about Weather Bell, and I can't say for certain if Bastardi is right or wrong.  As he says, only time will tell.  We'll see who's right in the end.  I personally am not a believer in human induced global warming.  For thousands of centuries, one species has not had radically changed an entire planet's atmosphere.  Then again, the proponents would argue that no species in history has ever been industrialized.  Nevertheless, considering how much gas is in the atmosphere (and especially considering that one Mt. St. Helens style volcanic eruption is enough to disrupt weather patterns for months), the impact that people put into the atmosphere is really insignificant.  However, considering I don't like breathing in smog as much as the next person, I am all for reasonable measures that are designed to clean up there air...just don't radically modify our way of life, that's all.