Fresh Air from WHYY, August 1, 2007 · Climatologist Kerry Emanuel, professor at MIT's Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, was named one of the world's 100 most influential people last year by Time magazine — in part because of a study he published, a month before Hurricane Katrina, that looked at thousands of hurricanes over several decades and found that the average power of the storms had doubled.

Emanuel, whose book on the subject is titled Divine Wind: The History and Science of Hurricanes, says that global warming is causing the stronger hurricanes — and he told The New York Times that warming has occurred "much too fast to ascribe to any natural process we know about."http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=12421331