Mark Twain & The Hurricane Season That Wasn't

Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody
does anything about it." -- Mark Twain

The 2006 U.S. hurricane season has ended with a whimper and without a single hurricane making landfall.

Originally forecast to be potentially as awful as the catastrophic 2005 season, there were a mere nine named storms (compared to a record 28 in 2005), including five hurricanes, only two of them major.

This more or less comported with the historical average for the past 150 years.

It was only the 18th season in 100 years in which no hurricanes made landfall. The years 2000 and 2001 were the last times this occurred.

National Hurricane Center forecasters said the drop in big storms was because of the unexpected formation of the El Nino in the Pacific Ocean in midsummer dampened tropical activity in the Atlantic.

They said that not even forecast models generated by super computers could see this phenomenon coming, but I have another explanation that Mark Twain would appreciate:

As improved as weather forecasting has become, it remains primitive compared to what Mother Nature has up her sleeve.

Case in point: The weather around Kiko's House in the Middle Atlantic region of the U.S. has defied prediction this year.

With the exception of a small handful of days when there was some ice or a (very little) snow, I rode my bike through an unseasonably mild winter. The spring was unseaonably dry, the summer unseasonably wet and autumn unseasonably warm. The high yesterday -- November 30 -- was a near-record 75 degrees F. and the overnight low a balmy 54 degrees F.

These kinds of wild swings have been going on since long before the first primitive weather records were kept in colonial America and can be seen in the detailed records that the National Weather Service and its predecessor agencies have been keeping since the 1880s.

What role does global warming play in all of this?

I daresay some, but probably not as much as is assumed.