I just finished reading Chris Mooney's Storm World and it left me wondering where all the hurricanes were last year and this year? The book is about the science and politcs of climate change and hurricanes, and is a restrained and thorough account of the history of hurricane science, the controversies surrounding the relationship between climate change and these giant storms, and what is known and what is not known about the synergy between the warming of the oceans and both hurricane (I use the term broadly to include all tropical cyclonic storms that reach hurricane status) intensity and frequency.
Mainly I am asking the Daily Kos community if anyone has information on why it has been so quiet in the Atlantic since the 2005 season . Theory has it that hurricanes may play a major role in redistributing heat in the climate system. Did this enormously stormy year redistribute that much heat from the oceans? Also, there has been major melting of ice around the globe. Is this cooling the oceans? What are the surface temperatures like in the Gulf of Mexica now? As I understand it, hurricanes are heat engines, taking the heat from the oceans and pulling it up into the upper atmosphere.
I was prompted to ask this question by Hurricane Flossie, which is near Hawaii. There have been some major hurricanes in the Pacific in the last couple years, and there was the one that came onshore in the Persian Gulf and surprised everyone.
Any climate scientists or meterologists around? My interest is practical, I live in NH, which has had hurricanes in the past, and my family has a place on the coast of Maine, where I lived through some interesting storms in the 1950s as a child.