Hurricanes and warming again

Amanda Marcotte reminds us not to be so glib about collective karma:

I'm gonna go ahead and plead for sympathy for Texas and I'll tell you why. If in fact the huge numbers of recent hurricanes is the fault of global warming--a very real possibility--I would like to point out that those Texans most likely to die from this are those least likely to be driving cars that get 4 miles to a gallon.

On the scientific front, I'll say that if she'd phrased it "the numbers of recent huge hurricanes" it would be more accurate, as the material she links makes clearer. As usual, RealClimate is on this, cautioning that it's impossible to pin a specific weather event to a single cause, but also describing the emerging indications that global warming is linked to a statistical increase in the power of hurricanes. The Emanuel paper mentioned there suggests a more impressive correlation than previous research has, when going by a measure called the Power Dissipation Index.

Part of the problem in talking about this is that, as Stephen Jay Gould once said, thinking correctly about statistics and probability is one of the hardest things for people to do. I never got around to linking to this, but I really liked their essay from August on what extreme events can and cannot tell us about general trends, something I'd been talking about with warinbabylon.