An interesting comment from a Kerry Emanuel, Professor of Meteorology at M.I.T. (Note: this transcript was taken before the storm hit - the day after the Mayor ordered the evacuation:)

If you look at the Atlantic, it’s perfectly fair to say that both the increase in ocean temperature in the last couple of decades and the upswing in hurricane activity is mostly natural. If there’s a global warming signal in that, it’s very hard to see. And that natural cycle, we don’t fully understand it, by the way, I don’t think anyone pretends that we do, but there have been in history, you know, periods of 20 or 30 years of inactivity followed by 20 or 30 years of activity. It’s nothing new, in fact.

Before the 1990s, a lot of hurricane specialists had forecasts that we were going to go back to an active period in the Atlantic, and again, this has nothing to do with global warming.

So these forecasts were not acted upon by a government that has formerly been accused ofdistorting scientific research that doesn’t fit with their political policies. At least not listening to their scientific advisors explains why the administration were caught flat footed when they realised how much damage had been done (8-balls can’t forecast things like that, can they)

Oh, check out the Union of Concerned Scientists site if you havn’t before. A right bunch of nuts the lot of them (the 12 Nobel Prize winners aside<ahem>).