Well, no, it isn't anything to do with that, because this isn't unusual. It's just the return of the high-activity cycle that we last had 30 or 40 years ago. There's no reason to think that this year was more active than the peak of the last cycle; the reason the number of named storms is so high is because we now have sattelites to spot them. Remember that many of this year's named storms never hit land anywhere, let alone anywhere important. Before the advent of weather sattelites, nobody would ever know about those storms, and they would never have been named.

And none of this years hurricanes were stronger or more destructive than some of the ones we've had in the past. I think the worst hurricane to hit the USA is still the one that took out Galveston about 100 years ago.