Kerry Emanuel

Time Magazine chose Kerry Emanuel for the “Time 100: People Who Shape Our World” feature that hits newsstands today. Emanuel will surely take issue with being called “the man who saw Katrina coming,” but such conclusions are inevitable for the man who published a paper in Nature last summer just before Katrina pointing to the connection between rising surface-level ocean temperatures and the increasing power of hurricanes. Emanuel tells Time:

“I didn’t expect to get people’s attention with this paper, but the timing, so close to Katrina, may have helped wake them up some.”

Time‘s piece does not mention new research from Emanuel, as yet unpublished, but mentioned in an article last month in the hurrican-obsessed Palm Beach Post, that Atlantic hurricanes are likely to be powerful and frequent for the next 100 years. Emanuel, again, as quoted by the Post:

“It’s unlikely we’ll ever see a quiet decade for the next 100 years in the Atlantic…I don’t think there’s any evidence of anything you would call a cycle.”

If he’s right that big, strong storms are here to stay, perhaps we should all pick up a copy of Emanuel’s other publishing venture from last summer, the heavily illustrated and highly informative Divine Wind: The History And Science Of Hurricanes (think, the art of science and nature). It is Emanuel’s attempt to convey to we non-climatologists his appreciation of the power and, yes, the beauty of these terrible storms.