Hurricanes and Global Warming

An interdisciplinary team of researchers survey the peer-reviewed literature to assess the relationships between global warming, hurricanes, and hurricane impacts. Debate over climate change frequently conflates issues of science and politics. Because of their significant and visceral impacts, discussion of extreme events is a frequent locus of such conflation. Linda Mearns, of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), aptly characterizes this context: “There’s a push on climatologists to say something about extremes, because they are so important. But that can be very dangerous if we really don’t know the answer ” (Henson 2005). In this article we focus