Weather Prediction 5

Predicting the weather is hard, and expert climatologists from Al Gore on down made wrong predictions about the 2006 hurricane season.

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.

Inconvenient or not, the nation's top hurricane scientists are divided on whether it's the truth.

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. The first tropical storm of this season showered light rain yesterday on Acapulco, a Mexican Pacific resort, but forecasters said the weather could worsen. Tropical storm Aletta was stalled 135 miles from Acapulco, with maximum winds of 45 mph, according to the U.S. National Hurricane Center in Miami, which said the storm could move toward land today.

The 2004 and 2005 Atlantic hurricane seasons broke many records, and as forecasters predict 15 named storms, nine or 10 making it to hurricane strength and four or five of those major, 2006 is shaping up as another bad one.

But 2006 was the calmest year in a decade.

With cataclysmic predictions that hurricanes would swarm from the tropics like termites, no one thought 2006 would be the most tranquil season in a decade.

I'll worry about global warming over the next century when scientists can make accurate predictions six months into the future.