Hot air

I don't think any weather prediction more than a few days out should be taken seriously. So this is no great shock:

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Tropical Storm Risk Consortium in London and, most recently, the Coastal Fluid Dynamics Laboratory at North Carolina State University in Raleigh are now among teams attempting to handicap the storm season weeks or months ahead.

After high-profile, back-to-back busts by Gray and others, critics have questioned whether these long-range outlooks do more harm than good. But the very question presupposes that Gray, et al., have been promising more than they can deliver.

They can pretty accurately predict an above- or below-average season, even predict the likelihood a major storm will hit SOMEWHERE along the U.S. coast. Beyond that, they're not promising anything.

But the hurricane-predicting hype has taken such root that there's probably no getting rid of it. At least the Associated Press correctly faults weather reporters for blindly adding to the hype by not holding the forecasters accountable for all the wrong calls they make.