This short New York Times story is getting a lot of attention on the right:

Because hurricanes form over warm ocean water, it is easy to assume that the recent rise in their number and ferocity is because of global warming.

But that is not the case, scientists say. Instead, the severity of hurricane seasons changes with cycles of temperatures of several decades in the Atlantic Ocean....

Problem is, the story quotes only two scientists -- and one of them, Kerry Emanuel of MIT, actually does think there's evidence of a correlation between global warming and the increased ferocity (though not the increase in number) of recent storms.

From AP a month ago:

Is global warming making hurricanes more ferocious? New research suggests the answer is yes....

The analysis by climatologist Kerry Emanuel of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology shows for the first time that major storms spinning in both the Atlantic and the Pacific since the 1970s have increased in duration and intensity by about 50 percent.

These trends are closely linked to increases in the average temperatures of the ocean surface and also correspond to increases in global average atmospheric temperatures during the same period....

This is the first time I have been convinced we are seeing a signal in the actual hurricane data," Emanuel said in an e-mail exchange.

"The total energy dissipated by hurricanes turns out to be well correlated with tropical sea surface temperatures," he said. "The large upswing in the past decade is unprecedented and probably reflects the effects of global warming."...

The details of Emanuel's research are noted, weakly, at the end of the Times story ("In an article this month in the journal Nature, Kerry A. Emanuel, a hurricane expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wrote that global warming might have already had some effect"), but -- satisfyingly to right wingers -- there's no acknowledgment that what Emanuel says contradicts the story's lead.