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Well, what you say may be true for the USA, but for the world NASA, WMO [PDF] and the MET office all disagree. Nice mis-information there.
USA != World

ACTUALLY:

There are records of hurricanes and tropical storms in the western North Atlantic dating back to 1492.

Meteorologists have only been naming storms for about 60 years. The 2nd most active storm season was 1933, prior to the naming convention.

The World Meteorological Organization has very stringent rules on what a named storm is -- it requires that the storm be tropical storm strength or greater. We "greenies" can't just choose to start doing things differently.

And it wouldn't matter anyway, since the record was for storms of tropical storm strength or greater. There were also records broken as far as hurricanes and major hurricanes (over category 3, so winds of 111 MPH or greater) go.

If we counted tropical depressions as well as tropical storms and hurricanes, we would have had a whopping 2 or 3 more this year.

If we didn't count the storms that were only detectable by satellite, we would have still been 4 storms over 1933's record.

And I should know, as hurricanes are my area of expertise.

Next time, research a bit before you start spewing forth your "information".

About ten days ago, I mentioned a New York Times story on my Web site about hurricane names:

The New York Times report that each Katrina is handling the problem in her own way. Others with last year's 281st most popular baby name for a girl are coping with their fateful association with the devastating storm by trying everything from defending their name against those who might make fun of it to questioning the hurricane naming system... ... Katrina, which means pure, reached its pinnacle of popularity as a name in 1980, when it was the 90th most common female baby name. Following only the whims of the fashion climate, 50 years ago the name was 489th in popularity, according to the Social Security Administration. It climbed to its peak 25 years later. But it slipped to No. 127 in 1990 and continued to fall... ... "How about doing away with names?" asked Katrina Heron, author of "Safe: The Race to Protect Ourselves in a Newly Dangerous World" (HarperCollins 2005), and a former editor at The New York Times Magazine. "Every time this horrible natural disaster strikes some group of people gets sideswiped." Ms. Heron has an alternative idea. "I think we should name hurricanes after vegetables we hate."

A spokesman from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) in Geneva, which issues names of hurricanes based on an alphabetical list that rotates annually and repeats every six years, did not respond to messages, but Stu Ostro, a senior meteorologist at the Weather Channel, said the world body was unlikely to change the system, which started in 1953. Experts had found that just giving storms numbers or locations was confusing. "The goal is to give valuable information clearly that can help save lives," Mr. Ostro said. "Maybe that's some solace the people named Camille or Katrina or Charley or Ivan can take."

The World Meteorological Organization does have a policy of retiring the names of particularly vicious storms, like Charley, Frances, Ivan and Jeanne, which pounded Florida last year, so this is likely to be the last Hurricane Katrina...

Great argument, although not supporting your point. In how many of those 100's of millions of years was the world habitable by human beings?

If you read WMO report (doc file in french, sorry). It describes that even though 2004 was the 4th hottest year on record, the extremes of cold killed many people. When you pump more energy into a system (which is what global warming is doing) then the oscillations of the system become larger. The cold extremes and the warm extremes increase.

NOAA is a memory of WMO, and they share observation information with other members. The US does not have weather observation sites around the globe as some might believe.

Weather data is split into two parts, obs of current conditions. Most places freely share this, while forecasts are often considered expensive because of the supercomputer time used to run numeric computational forecast models, so numerous try to do some cost recovery from clients who want specific forecast details or massive amounts of details, including commercial groups like Accuweather and the Weather Channel.

Is it just me, or is there always a charge of "the environmentalists are just trying to protect their funding" from the "it's junk science" crowd, without even a glimmer of acknowledgement of the irony? A single corporation that feels "threatened" by an environmental study makes more in a day than their environmentalist critics do in a year. If protecting your income is enough to get you to lie about something like this, organizations with a lot of money invested in, and a lot of profits riding on, the status quo have a much better reason to vigorously dismiss their opponents calling for change. (The scientists, after all, can go on to get funding for something else with much less "economic disruption" than industries can usually change.)

I'm not arguing one way or another about the ozone layer here, but this is a "bias" that the all-regulation-is-evil crowd doesn't seem to ever want to acknowledge. A hundred scientists at a hundred universities, they're all hacks motivated by something other than real science--but the folks in the coal power industry, they don't have any interest in the outcome, so let's accept their word uncritically?

Incidentally, the ozone hole over the southern hemisphere was, in a 2002 report, about 40-50% larger than when the hole was first reported on in the early 80s, not "2% bigger." In some local areas it was up to 70% for short periods. (The "hole" contracts and expands seasonally, and these are averages.) Shrinking by 20% presumably means that, on average, it's now 32%-40% bigger than it was when first reported--and yes, it's probably too early to know if that's a trend, because that's implicit in the definition of the word "trend." Ozone-depleting chemicals in the atmosphere have been trending downward over the last decade, and the recovery of the ozone layer was expected in that 2002 report--the 1987 Montreal Protocol has been followed pretty well. (And as strange as it may seem, there are no documented examples of industry collapse and economic ruin due to this onerous government intrusion into business.)

The best non-commerical meta-site is the WMO - World Meteorology Organaization's World Weather site.

But most environmentalists beg that question, and accept it as a given that "the weather is getting more extreme". I disagree with that premise and defy someone to show me figures showing drastic increases in precipitation, temperature, storm destruction, etc. over a 30+ year span (to leave out the 20-year sunspot/storm cycle).

Here you go, enjoy. I could find only ONE link that disagreed that weather was getting more extreme, from NASA:

Even with Needed Corrections, Data Still Don't Show the Expected Signature of Global Warming.

The rest say a definite YES that the weather is getting more extreme, most that it is caused by global warming, and some that this global warming is caused by humans:


NOVA and FRONTLINE join forces to investigate the science and politics of one of the most controversial issues of the 21st century: the truth about global warming.

I would especially like to draw your attention to

this graph.

2001 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change


TESTIMONY OF THOMAS R. KARL, DIRECTOR NATIONAL CLIMATIC DATA CENTER NATIONAL ENVIRONMENTAL SATELLITE DATA AND INFORMATION SERVICES NATIONAL OCEANIC AND ATMOSPHERIC ADMINISTRATION BEFORE THE
COMMITTEE ON GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS UNITED STATES SENATE.


WMO STATEMENT ON THE STATUS OF THE GLOBAL CLIMATE IN 2001


National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration - Global Warming - Frequently Asked Questions

Cheers,
Lars

"The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been established by WMO and UNEP to assess scientific, technical and socio- economic information relevant for the understanding of climate change, its potential impacts and options for adaptation and mitigation." (see here ).