Thar' They Blow (again...) !!

It's "hurricane prediction" season again, and the climatic doomsayers are coming out of their closets and spouting their visions of our wet n' wild doom:

A noted hurricane researcher predicted Wednesday that rising water temperatures in the Atlantic will bring a "well above average" storm season this year, including four major storms.

The updated forecast by William Gray's team at Colorado State University calls for 15 named storms in the Atlantic in 2008 and says there's a better than average chance that at least one major hurricane will hit the United States,

An average of 5.9 hurricanes form in the Atlantic each year....

Let's hit the wayback machine and visit the dire days of 2006:

May 29, 2006 - Al Gore's new movie on global warming, "An Inconvenient Truth," opens with scenes from Hurricane Katrina slamming into New Orleans. The former vice president says unequivocally that because of global warming, it is all but certain that future hurricanes will be more violent and destructive than those in the past.

With the official start of hurricane season days away, meteorologists are unanimous that the 2006 tropical storm season, which runs from June 1 through November, is likely to be a doozy...

And the results of season of '06? The envelope, please!

9: The number of named storms this year
17: The number of named storms predicted May 31 by a team at Colorado State University led by Professor William Gray

Hey! Now where did I hear that name before? Oh, yeah....

Gray's 2007 predictions were as follows:

Named storms (17)
Hurricanes (9)
Major hurricanes (5)

Did Gray improve in 2007? Hmmm....:

...2007 [wil]l rank as a historically inactive TC year for the Northern Hemisphere as a whole. During the past 30 years, only 1977, 1981, and 1983 have had less activity to date...

And how does this media-darling meteorologist defend his wildly off-the-mark prognostications?

"We don't worry about it," he said. "We've moved ahead."

To the next batch of bad science, no doubt.

Eventually, the truth comes out:

Gray's team says precise predictions are impossible, and the warnings raise awareness of hurricanes.

"Raise awareness"? By scare tactics and exaggerated threats? Seems like by constantly crying "Wolf!", these rogue weathermen are actually raising the possibility that a true warning will be ignored...

Call me naive, but I miss the good old days when science actually relied on, you know, what were they called again?

Oh yeah - facts !