There is a fundamental problem with all such climate and weather related predictions (not just with doom-and-gloom type), and it is one that relates directly to the science of reefing.
That is that human beings are trying to evaluate trends that exist on a time scale many times that of a normal human life span.
What is very significant to man may not matter a whit over geological time. An example:
Suppose, just for the sake of illustration, that the earth's average temperature fluctuates cyclically in a fixed range with a regular sinusoidal variation having a period of one thousand years.
Now suppose that a good-faith observer making regular temperature readings over a ten year period finds the average temperature to be increasing almost monotonically - on such a short time span, this might be due to purely random noise in the cycle, even though they were actually living in a century that was on a falling portion of the sine wave.
Now, suppose a somewhat wiser observer recognizes the flaw in a ten-year study and goes back more than two hundred years by looking at temperature records in old almanacs and by examining the rings in old-growth trees. This observer chuckles knowingly at the naiveté of the ten-year observer, and concludes that the earth's average temperature is in fact falling rather than rising. But of course, this observer is also wrong, having examined only one-quarter of the full actual cycle.
Finally, suppose a third scientist pulls out all the stops and gathers accurate, world-wide records covering five hundred years - but for a time period that happens to center right at the bottom cusp of the sine wave. This scientist concludes that the earth's average temperature was falling for 250 years before due to a min-ice age, but has been rising for the last 200 years due to the influence of industrial man.
This last scientist is just as wrong as the others, not only because his sample size was too small, but because he assigned erroneous, unsupported interpretations as to the cause of the behavior of his data.
One would need accurate temperature records over the whole globe for three- to five-thousand years to accurately recognize what was really going on in terms of the temperature cycle - even assuming the cycle were a simple regular sine wave.
Even the US National Weather Service only dates back to just after the American Civil War, and has records for only a fraction of the United States for most of that time. All records before that have to be inferred from the fragmentary reports, or from the geological record, a process open to interpretations influenced by all sorts of human weakness, everything from ignorance to ego to outright malice.
In closing, it should be noted that the "news" agencies quoted above in this post are all citing the same questionable primary source -- a recent article that appeared in a pulp "science" magazine. Magazines have to publish every month, and newspapers have to publish every day, regardless of whether anything worth printing about is going on, so what we are really seeing here is just the dross of a slow news day in the summer. Most of the popular press just copies each-other and prints what comes off the wire services anyway. Very little actual journalism goes on any more.
(In any case, your tank is much more likely to experience a power outage from a car hitting a utility pole or from a squirrel shorting a transformer than from a hurricane, so prepare anyway.)
[ July 22, 2001: Message edited by: BReefCase ]
[ July 22, 2001: Message edited by: BReefCase ]