Since I brought up the UNFCCC earlier, I’ll note that Chris Mooney is struggling with this little aspect of climate weather:

Here comes the story of no hurricanes

From a PR standpoint, it was surely an ingenious idea: Let’s name hurricanes after leading members of Congress who deny that humans are causing global warming! That’s the gist of the “Climate Name Change” campaign that launched last month, and the promotional video has already garnered over 2 million YouTube views.

There’s just one problem: Thus far this season, the hurricanes haven’t shown up. In fact, the dearth of hurricane-strength Atlantic storms up until now, despite blockbuster pre-season forecasts, counts as downright mysterious. “We’ve never seen this level of inactivity with the ocean conditions out there now,” says meteorologist Jeff Masters, who is co-founder of Weather Underground, a popular meteorological website. There has even been speculation that 2013 might rival 2002, a year in which the first hurricane of the season didn’t form until Sept. 11.

Meanwhile, a new scientific paper suggests that climate change will decrease, rather than increase, the likelihood that Superstorm Sandy-like storms — atmospheric black swans that take left turns towards the U.S. East Coast — will strike in the future. And a leaked draft of the U.N.’s forthcoming Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report has significantly downgraded our confidence in the idea that global warming will lead to more intense hurricanes (or, is already doing so).

[…]

I’ve always been cautious of pushing hurricane stories as part of an AGW campaign, and used to write such comments back when LVQ and climate change were hot topics around here.

What Mooney skirts around the edges, and doesn’t hit head on, is that communicating highly esoteric subjects like climatology and meteorology to the general public, and especially to politicians, is probably futile. There are good reasons for this - experts are called such because they develop expertise in an area that most others lack.

Cyclogenesis has always been a tricky thing to study because it requires a tremendous amount of data that has been hard to measure, and it relies on computationally demanding subjects like fluid dynamics.

Anyway, these subjects are not for the faint of heart, as far as “communicating the science”, as Mooney might label his efforts.

This is also why climate change is probably not a productive subject for politicians to aggressively try to tackle, in a proactive sense (though it of course can always be fuel for those politicians vying for the know-nothing vote.)

The election of Rudd in Australia is partially being credited to his promise to roll back taxes on carbon. This strengthens the claim that publics don’t want to pay for AGW mitigation strategies.

In light of this, arguing extensively about esoteric subjects such as the effect of AGW on cyclogenesis will have no value politically.