How sensitive is the hurricane response to different global model projections of large-scale changes over the Atlantic?

We are in the process of repeating the calculations in our paper using the changes in ocean and large-scale atmospheric conditions generated by individual global models from the CMIP3 PCMDI archive, rather than the ensemble mean of these changes across these models. We expect that those models that show larger Atlantic warming relative to their tropical mean warming (as compared to the average over all of the models) will generate less of a reduction than we describe in this paper, or even an increase in tropical Atlantic storms. But we do not anticipate any results comparable to the 200-300% increase over the next century that one obtains by a naïve extrapolation of recent trends. Our guess is that this level of increase is only possible if the tropical temperature profile as a whole is strongly destabilized by greenhouse gas increases (in contrast to the projections from our global models) or if the Atlantic continues to warm more rapidly than the tropical oceans as a whole ( ...  more