Just the facts ma'am.

From An overblown hypothesis - On hurricanes and climate change. by James Piereson. Piereson is doing the research journalists won't do.

We are well into hurricane season with a dangerous storm lurking off the coast of Florida and now poised to make a run up the east coast of the United States. As happens every year at this time, the appearance of hurricanes provokes speculation about the role of climate change in the formation of these destructive storms.

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It is a plausible hypothesis and, unlike many claims in this area, is capable of being tested against the facts. The evidence for it turns out to be quite thin—at least in relation to the certainty with which it is usually expressed.

[snip]

How, then, in view of these data, should we assess the claims that Atlantic hurricanes are increasing in numbers and strength in recent decades in response to rising atmospheric and ocean temperatures, and are also making landfall at increasing rates?

There has been a modest increase in the frequency of Atlantic hurricanes in recent decades along with a slight increase in their strength from year to year, but no increase in the number of hurricanes making landfall in the United States and no increase since 1950 in the number of the most powerful hurricanes (Category 4 and 5 storms) to hit the U.S. mainland. Moreover, any trend that we find in the frequency and strength of hurricanes in the past few decades is mostly washed out when we compare those rates to the ones experienced in the 1950s and 1960s. This suggests that the frequency and strength, though perhaps increasing of late, are but loosely related to recent measured increases in Atlantic Ocean temperatures.