That's a little surprising given NOAA's adamant objection to the study published in Nature a year or so ago that showed hurricanes becoming more intense due to air pollution. NOAA went so far as to say the hurricane trend was attributable to some vague multidecade cycle they had named and loosely defined. It was sort of "There is too much uncertainty about man-made warming, so we're going to blame an even more uncertain factor we invented and can barely describe."

btw, I think the 2006 average temperature was recently revised downward to only about 1.6 degrees above normal, not 2 degrees as the article states. "Near record" is still a fair label nonetheless.