Two Centuries of hurricane data

From World Climate Report:

A very interesting article was published in a recent issue of the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and the results are of considerable interest in the debate about tropical cyclones and global warming.

In Tree-ring isotope records of tropical cyclone activity, the authors describe how they used oxygen isotope levels in the annual rings of longleaf pine trees in Georgian and Florida as proxy data to create a record of hurricane activity going back 220 years.

First, it is obvious that large hurricanes have impacted southern Georgia throughout the past 220 years, and some of the storms were larger than any storm in recent years. But more importantly, the record shows that some periods are active, others are quiet, and that this has been the case for a long time into the past (i.e. prior to any large-scale anthropogenic climate influences). This means that there is now more reason to believe that variations during the 20th century in the frequency and intensity of Atlantic tropical cyclones are very likely to have a significant natural component to them.

Source (pdf).