[Two inconvenient centuries?: If CO2 drives hurricanes, why did hurricanes go *down* when CO2 went up?]

He went on to describe how hurricanes devastated the Georgia coast repeatedly in the 1800s. Using historical records such as newspaper archives and ship journals, he and other hurricane historians have assigned modern intensity designations to those storms. Georgia saw a major hurricane - a category 3 or higher - on average every 17 years that century.

Several factors indicate this century may be more like the stormy 1800s than the calm 1900s, Sandrik said. Climate change is one.