Yesterday's snowflakes mingling with aurulent-russet foliage were a fitting commemoration of the call for a premature end to this year's Atlantic hurricane season. Three weeks ago today, Dr. William Gray and his team at Colorado State University's Department of Atmospheric Science applied a final revision to their annual hurricane forecast — insignificant tropical activity in October, likely none in November.
Gray's errata were several. In December of 2005, Gray and his colleagues expected "another very active" season in 2006 that would result in less landfalls than 2004 and 2005 but, as recently as April of this year, "well above their long-period averages." By August, the team lowered its estimate of proximate and prolonged hurricanes, while still anticipating more than usual. An August that would later be assessed "inactive" led to projecting September's and October's respective activity levels as slightly higher and lower than normal, with yearly volume and intensity below averages. This adjusted forecast was confirmed on October 3rd, when Gray's team predicted a quiet October and a dormant November.
Such was the contravention of National Geographic's own prophecy, announced in an August cover story. On the front of the magazine, atop the photograph of a cyclonic leviathan devouring the seaboard, was the title "Killer Hurricanes," for which, advised a subtitle, mankind could expect "No End in Sight." Inside, the article's first page advertised 16-point-font possibilities of "monster storms" approaching coastlines with regularity. The article's third page captioned an opposing page full of white spirals, twenty-seven hurricanes and tropical storms as seen from satellites. Three sentences beginning with the anaphoric omen "never before" asserted new precedents. Only one was precise: Hurricane Katrina was by far the most costly on the North American record. Claims of prodigious numbers of named storms (twenty-seven) and hurricanes (fifteen) were only supported by an extension of the calendar weeks beyond useful comparison — otherwise the tallies were twenty-three and thirteen.
What brought the meteorological profusion? National Geographic was prepared for readers who might ask, and on the article's last two pages laid conjecture upon conjecture — citing the imputation of "global warming." From whose laboratory did it come from? Author Tom Hayden identified Kerry Emmanuel of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Peter Webster of the Georgia Institute of Technology. In 2005 Emmanuel and Webster independently published hypotheses on causes for a perceived increase in the dimensions of tropical cyclones. Each observed rising ocean temperatures and greater hurricane intensity over the last forty years. Of Emmanuel's presupposed "anthropogenic effects," Hayden wrote "it would be easier to find a building undamaged by Katrina in New Orleans' Ninth Ward than to locate a reputable climate scientist who doubts that human activity is warming the earth."
The next man whom Hayden quoted was one such reputable climate scientist, none other than Dr. William Gray. Gray, in an interview with Denver Post columnist David Harsanyi, said of "global warming" and its industrial provenance, "a crowd of baby boomers and yuppies have hijacked this thing," and that "in 15-20 years, we'll look back and see what a hoax this was." In National Geographic, Hayden allowed Gray two words — "plain wrong" — but Gray's formal demurral was in his December 2005 hurricane report. Warm waters or not, Gray flatly stated "the global numbers of hurricanes and their intensity have not shown increases in recent years." And a trend? "There have been similar past periods (1940s-1950s) when the Atlantic was just as active as in recent years," and when in fact "there was a general global cooling."
A decade ago, Gray measured a tropical latency over twenty-five years — fewer big ones, fewer hits. In 2001 he warned that "climatology will eventually right itself," and produce more landfalls "in the coming decades." Gray's worry, however, was the potential loss of life in coastal settlements, an entire generation ignorant of storm seasons half a century before — philanthropic, not apocalyptic. A bad pair of years was an outlier, Gray concluded last December, what he wrote missed by National Geographic: "We should not try to read more into these years than this."