Sidebar: Super Storms?

Surveys show that when worrying about global warming, people fear hurricanes most, but the scientific community has yet to agree on how climate change really impacts tropical storms.

Kerry Emanuel, an atmospheric scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, is one of the scientists who think global warming and hurricanes are connected.

"When we looked at the data, we saw a very strong response in the Atlantic Ocean to global warming," he said. "The new finding was that there's a strong correlation between hurricane power and ocean temperature."

His study, documented in a 2005 issue of the journal Nature, found no increase in hurricane frequency due to global warming, but he did see that the energy - through wind speed and storm duration - released by the average hurricane increased by 50 percent since the mid-1970s.

On the flip side, Jim O'Brien, professor emeritus of meteorology and oceanography at Florida State University, isn't convinced that global warming is causing hurricane intensity to increase.

"There is a climate variability that occurs that has to be considered," said O'Brien, a past state climatologist for Florida and a widely known El Niño expert. He added that climate change trends can't be derived from hurricane data that's limited and only recently has been improved by technology.

Alternatively Virginia Burkett, global change science coordinator for the U.S. Geological Survey, worries the real danger is the intensification of storms accompanied with the acceleration of sea rise.

"Low-lying coastal areas will become more frequently inundated during normal tides and during tropical storm passage," she said.

Though the disagreements about global warming effects can confuse nonscientists looking for answers, said Gabriel Vecchi, research scientist at the NOAA Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, N.J., challenging of others' conclusions is an integral part of the scientific process.

Vecchi cautions people from reading too much into any one scientific conclusion, including his own. His study found that warming waters might actually decrease the number of hurricanes in the Atlantic because of increased wind shear - the difference in speed and direction of atmospheric winds. Wind shear counteracts hurricanes and disrupts the ones that do form.   

"In a broad sense, a conclusion from this paper is that the relationship between global warming and hurricanes is certainly complex," he said. "One can't just extrapolate out [that] warming temperatures means more hurricanes."