And there is a lot of data there. As I lamented, it has not been thoroughly updated during the current administration. I don't know if that is normal or lacking someone to crunch the numbers due to budget cuts. And those are important years, because as ER observes, as we all do, this hurricane season has been anomalous. Record numbers of named storms, unusual numbers of active storms at the same time...Damn if there wasn't one (I forget the name off the top of my head there have been sooo many) that actually drifted off into the Atlantic only to regain some strength and drench the Iberian Peninsula!

But it is a huge data set! It's what governments are supposed to do when they work right. With a complete data set from this website, a decent computer, GIS, a statistician, a budget, a stipend, and a couple of months, we could tease out if ER's intuition that hurricanes are developing more often than usual in the Gulf and the Northwestern Caribbean.

Hurricanes are organized complicated solitons and agents of entropy that deliver heat from the tropical oceans to temperate climates. We know that the atmosphere is getting hotter on a millions of years' timescale. We know the same is true for the ocean. The sea surface temperatures are rising and that increase is getting deeper into the ocean. Part of sea-level rise is thermal expansion.

ER has spent a lot of time in areas in the path of these storms. He's a sea dog; I'm a mountain goat. He can read the wind on the water; I read landscapes. I trust his intuition but I cannot prove or disprove his hypothesis.

I know what I have seen in my own part of North America. Although for the last couple of weeks I haven't been able to see far on account of the smoke. The landscape is changing because of climate change. The pine trees, killed by beetles, are not coming back after these conflagrations. Fires that burned just a few miles from here thirty years ago still have no trees. None. Not even aspen trees, which normally grow first and provide a shaded canopy for pine seedlings. That's what happened after they were logged a hundred years ago. Colorado's environment is becoming New Mexico's - pinyon, cedar, and sage. And New Mexico's is becoming Mexico's. This is what I have seen of 50+ years on the Front Range.

(I am aware that this post probably should have been under ER's. And that you are fully in the choir on the topic. Just felt like ranting, being verbose, and annoyingly pedantic this evening. Thanks.)