Oh, look. They decided there’s a connection between hurricanes and global warming:

The opening skirmish in the debate began when Kerry Emanuel, a well-known researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, changed his mind. In July, he withdrew from a paper reflecting the consensus view that there was little evidence of a significant connection in the historical record. In an e-mail, he wrote to a co-author that “the problem for me is that I cannot sign on to a paper which makes statements I no longer believe are true.”

“I see a large global warming signal in hurricanes,” he wrote.

The next month, he published a paper in Nature considering 50 years of storm data and stating that indeed, hurricanes in the Atlantic and North Pacific were becoming more powerful. By a special measure of hurricane power he had defined for other research, they had roughly doubled in power over 30 years. Significantly, the increase tracked with the rise in sea surface temperatures.

There was more to come. In September, a group of scientists led by Peter Webster at Georgia Tech found that, worldwide, the number of the strongest hurricanes — categories 4 and 5 — has nearly doubled over the past 35 years. The authors aligned the finding with global warming and a rise in sea surface temperatures.

“Our work is consistent with the concept that there is a relationship between increasing sea surface temperature and hurricane intensity,” Webster said at the time.