This summer was the 16th coldest on record!

[UdoKier]

http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2004/s2319.htm

And hurricanes galore!

Perhaps "The Day After Tomorrow" is approaching!

http://www.apple.com/trailers/fox/dayaftertomorrow/trailer/

Or it could be that weather varies from year to year and people love to see cataclysm in every bump in the trends...

[Longhorn]

1. I have to tell you, it was nice in Texas for a change!

But I hate the fact that so many people lost lives and property due to the hurricanes.

[Dogmudgeon]

2. It's not the "bump"

The overall record of the climate has shown an increasingly unstable pace of changes -- bigger swings in either direction. This is exactly what would be expected with an increase in global heat.

So, next year could be the hottest Summer on record, and yet there might be no hurricanes whatsoever.

However it goes, over a period of as short as a decade, you can clearly see in the data that the deviations from the norm are getting larger and larger.

--bkl

[StClone]

3. Major Weather event

Forces in the North Hemisphere pushed much of the cold air created at the North Pole and Siberia to flop over the top of the world invading the eastern 3/4 of U.S. Concurrently the warm air of the Neotropics was capped and prevented from distributing northward. The accumulating warm air and warm water are the life blood of hurricanes.