HURRICANES AND GLOBAL WARMING Author : R. A. P ELKE Jr

Debate over climate change frequently conflates
issues of science and politics. Because of their
significant and visceral impacts, discussion of
extreme events is a frequent locus of such conflation.
Linda Mearns, ofthe NationalCenter forAtmospher-
icResearch(NCAR), aptly characterizes thiscontext:
“There’s a push on climatologists to say something
about extremes, because they are so important. But
that can be very dangerous if we really don’t know
the answer” (Henson 2005). In this article we focus