What does it mean? Very hard to say in the short term. Note that in April, M.I.T. climate scientist Kerry Emanuel published research calling into question a recent role for global warming in rising hurricane intensity or frequency. Essentially, Dr. Emanuel seems to feel that the discrepancies between what some climate models predict about rising hurricane intensity as humans heat up the globe, and what's actually happening in nature, need acknowledgement and further study.
It's a significant shift for Dr. Emanuel, who is the scientist who "foresaw a rise in hurricane intensity in a human-warmed world and in 2005, just a few weeks before Hurricane Katrina swamped New Orleans, asserted in a Nature paper that he had found statistical evidence linking rising hurricane energy and warming," wrote Andrew Revkin of The New York Times on April 12. "The new study, in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, is hardly definitive in its own right, essentially raising more questions than it resolves. But it definitely rolls back Dr. Emanuel's sense of confidence about a recent role for global warming."
According to Nasa Earth Observatory, Bertha started near the Cape Verde Islands during the first week of July. "By the early morning hours of July 7, it had become a Category 1 hurricane, and less than 12 hours later had intensified to Category 3 status, with winds near 115 mph. Two days later, when this image was captured, the storm had weakened to Category 1, but was forecast to re-intensify."
Image: NASA image created by Jesse Allen, using data provided courtesy of the MODIS Rapid Response team. Caption by Rebecca Lindsey.
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