The new hurricanes and a warm winter

Well hurricane Wilma is forming in the Gulf of Mexico, and since hurricane season has another month we will soon see the Greek Alphabet letter storms for the first time ever. Hopefully, Wilma, Alpha, Beta, Gamma and any other storms that follow will spare the Gulf Coast, but since tropical storms almost always hit land someone will have to suffer. Right now Wilma is expected to hit Mexico in the next few days, but we will have to wait and see.

Why do I think we will see Letter storms?
Well here in Dallas it is still in the 90’s and it is mid-October. These high temps are hurricane fuel, and with the temps expected to continue for the foreseeable future there will be lots of fuel!

The only good news from all this is that we are expecting a warm winter across much of the country. Since natural gas and fuel oil prices are expected to be at record prices, 90% higher than last years already high prices, a warm winter would be welcome. While the NOAA says the warmer area will be mostly in the central US and the North West, even if the Northeast has its usual brutal winter, as long as the whole country doesn’t have high fuel use, fuel prices will stay down.

Caveat:
Remember fuel stocks are being built up right now and the people who decide the stocking levels are using the same NOAA map I am using, and while the overall winter maybe warmer it says nothing of winter storms. So they have decisions to make about how much to stock, and if they decide to stock for a 60% warmer winter than normal we could have problems. One large storm sweeping across the central US, could cause a surge in demand which will deplete supplies and will raise prices significantly. Since the storms move from the NW to SE, the opposite direct that fuel comes up from the Gulf Coast, it will take longer to replenish stocks in the North as fuel is withdrawn to meet increased demand in the South, so if a series of storms come through it might be a bad winter for the Central US.

With El Nino you have to take that good with the bad.