PUT A PIN IN IT.

The first day of June is the administrative start of the hurricane season, and the doom-sayers are doing what they normally do.  NOAA Predicts 'Extraordinary' Atlantic Hurricane Season as Ocean Temperatures Soar.

The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration warned Thursday that it expects "above-normal hurricane activity in the Atlantic basin this year" due to rising ocean temperatures related to the climate emergency and La Niña conditions in the Pacific Ocean.

"NOAA's outlook for the 2024 Atlantic hurricane season, which spans from June 1 to November 30, predicts an 85% chance of an above-normal season, a 10% chance of a near-normal season, and a 5% chance of a below-normal season," the agency—which is part of the U.S. Department of Commerce—said in a statement.

Rick Spinrad, who heads NOAA, said the agency is bracing for an "extraordinary" Atlantic hurricane season.

NOAA is forecasting between 17 and 25 total named storms—which have winds of 39 mph or higher—with 8-13 of these predicted to become hurricanes, which have winds of 74 mph or higher. The agency is predicting 4-7 major hurricanes, defined as having winds in excess of 111 mph. NOAA said forecasters have 70% confidence in these predictions.

"Of note, the forecast for named storms, hurricanes, and major hurricanes is the highest NOAA has ever issued for the May outlook," Spinrad told reporters, adding that "the warmer ocean means it's a more energetic ocean."

It seems like we get these warnings year in and year out.  Is past performance any indication of future results?

[R]esearchers said Monday they have constructed a clearer picture than ever, and found that the frequency of the planet’s most devastating storms has decreased over the past century.

The study, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, found that the annual number of global hurricanes, typhoons and tropical storms — or tropical cyclones, more generally — declined by roughly 13% as the planet warmed during the 20th century.

Scientists found that trend in most of the world’s oceans — except for the North Atlantic, where the number of storms increased.

The lead researcher on the study told CNN that while his team found a drop in frequency, that doesn’t mean storms are becoming less of a threat. In fact, said Savin Chand, a senior lecturer at the Federation University in Australia, while there may be fewer tropical cyclones in the future, it is likely they will be more intense.

“Cyclones are no doubt one of the costliest natural disasters everywhere,” Chand told CNN. “What’s happening with global warming is that these underlying conditions are getting more unfavorable for cyclones to form in the first place. But even though cyclones are getting fewer, those that do form are now feeding more energy from the warming atmosphere, so that’s why they’re getting more intense.”

Tropical cyclones need a special set of conditions in order to develop from a cluster of thunderstorms into enormous, swirling heat engines. Over the years, scientists have become increasingly confident that human-caused climate change is making those conditions more uncommon — but when they do form, warmer air and ocean temperatures are making them more potent.

That cyclones might "get more costlier" because there are more of us buying beachfront property, and relying on government bailouts when our beach gets washed out, doesn't occur to any of these people.

Hang on, it gets more bizarre.

Figuring out how the climate crisis is changing tropical cyclones has been a challenge due to limited historical data. Suzana Camargo, co-author of the study and professor at Columbia University, said the goal was to put all the existing evidence together to try to “breach the uncertainty — or make it a little smaller.”

“People have been doing different attempts to try to figure out what happened with other datasets, using different methodologies, so I see this paper as another piece of the puzzle,” Camargo told CNN. “We do not have data in the past, and we cannot go back and be there now, so this paper is trying to recreate in a different way that has been done so far what has happened in the relation to number of tropical cyclones.”

Adding to that uncertainty is a field of developing research on the impact of air pollution. Unlike greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide or methane, this pollution reflects sunlight back to space, which has a cooling effect. While there are natural sources of this air pollution, much of it in the early to mid-20th century came from sources like industrial smokestacks and car exhaust.

“When you just look at the North Atlantic, the study is very consistent with my [previous research],” Hiro Murakami, co-author of the study and a scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, told CNN.

Murakami’s study published in May found that over the past four decades, a decrease in air pollution over North America and Europe resulted in an increase in the number of hurricanes in the North Atlantic. On the other side of the world, researchers detected a decrease in the number of typhoons in the western North Pacific, sparked by an increase in aerosol pollution in China and India.

Maybe it's time for the people doing climate research to concentrate on the positive science, offering hypotheses and investigating them, and resist the temptation to go normative immediately. You wouldn't want some wiseacre setting forest fires and claiming it was in the service of mitigating hurricanes, would you?

We'll revisit this post come Oktoberfest, see what sort of havoc has been unleashed on the beaches.  The extrapolation has already begun, and the fear-mongering.

Florida meteorologist Michael Lowry, the hurricane specialist at WPLG in Miami, wrote Wednesday for Yale Climate Connections that "waters across the Atlantic's tropical belt—extending from the coast of Africa through the Caribbean—are hotter now than in any other late May on record, with over 90% of the area's sea surface engulfed in record or near-record warmth."

"The extent of marine heat has never been greater heading into a hurricane season, outpacing by wide margins the previous late May record-holder in 2005, a year remembered for one of the most active and destructive hurricane seasons in modern history." Among those storms was Hurricane Katrina.ccOcean temperatures are soaring as policymakers around the world continue to not only resist phasing out the fossil fuels driving the planetary emergency but also expand oil, gas, and coal development. Many coastal communities are unprepared for the extreme weather events that are increasing as air and sea temperatures rise.

"As a climate scientist that tracks hurricane activity, I recognize that the fun-filled summer season has increasingly become a time of dread for the dangers that await," Astrid Caldas, a senior climate scientist for community resilience at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said Thursday. "The people and places that have found themselves in the path of a tropical storm can attest to its utter and enduring devastation, which often hits communities of color and low-income communities the hardest."

It is a truth universally acknowledged that any organization with "concerned" in its title is a nest of fretful killjoys. Let them fret. Enjoy your summer. If they're right, they'll be screeching about it come Labor Day, the weekend Katrina came ashore. If they're wrong, they'll resume the scaremongering again next June.