I never thought I'd find myself recommending, as reading to you folks, something put out by the Competitive Enterprise Institute. But it turns out that, while I find its conclusions a bit biased, this lengthy 1997 study (PDF) by Robert Balling nevertheless gives quite a thorough overview of how the battle over global warming and hurricanes played out during the 1990s. The issue, of course, wasn't nearly as high profile then; and some folks have since changed positions and/or sides. But it's a very interesting read.
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I would be very interested in hearing your take on what at first blush appears to be a very fair and well-balanced article in the New York Times about the state of the science debate concerning global climate change.
While the Balling paper may be interesting from a historical perspective, it has little if any relevance to a proper debate about global warming and hurricane intensity and/or frequency.
First:
1) Perhaps I was still living in a bubble back in 1997 when Robert Balling wrote that paper (I have forgotten the actual date when I emerged), but back then, I had not even heard about the supposedly (according to Balling) "highly popular view [that] has developed that the buildup of greenhouse gases will cause the sea-surface and atmospheric temperatures to rise, and that this will result in an increase in the number and intensity of damaging hurricanes around the world".
I graduated from college back in the old days (early 80's), lest some assume that I was still a youngster back in 1997 and from my own (admittedly provincial) view, the "popular debate" about the relationship between global warming and hurricanes seems to be fairly recent (last few years), at least on the "popular imagination" scale that Balling seems to imply in his 1997 piece.
Second:
A lot of science has been done since 1997 (including recent research by Emanuel on the historic relationship between SST and tropical cyclone intensity) and research showing that the satellite data which indicated cooling (to which Balling referred) was biased**
http://www.climatescience.gov/Library/sap/sap1-1/finalreport/sap1-1-fin…
**If satellites can not be trusted to be unbiased, whom can we trust? In all seriousness, the bias was not of the personal/political type of course (Q: Do sateliites have personalities and/or political leanings?), but of the instrumental type.
If people want to understand something about the basic science of huricanes and how such storms might be impacted by global warming, I suggest that it is best to get the information from those who are the most knowledgeable about the subject. These are usually those who are actually doing the current research: eg, MIT's Kerry Emanuel, who has adressed many of the most common questions and misconceptions about the current state of the science:
http://wind.mit.edu/~emanuel/anthro2.htm