THE United States coastline has been calm so far this hurricane season, just as it has been over the last decade. Since 2005, the year of Hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Wilma, the country has been in a hurricane “drought,” with no major hurricane (Category 3 or above, meaning winds above 110 miles per hour) making landfall. The nation’s most hurricane-prone regions, the Southeast and Gulf Coasts, have been eerily quiet.

Even so, climate scientists like me believe that human-induced climate change will strengthen hurricanes and lead to worse disasters. We know that significant global warming, over a degree and a half Fahrenheit, has already occurred since preindustrial days. So where, you might ask, are the powerful hurricanes?

They’re coming, if we don’t take more aggressive action to slow climate change.

What we have seen recently is consistent with our scientific understanding of hurricanes and climate. That knowledge is far from perfect, but the prediction of stronger future hurricanes is not contradicted by the data thus far.

The Atlantic Ocean, where hurricanes affecting the United States arise, generates only a little over 10 percent of the planet’s tropical cyclones, a term that includes both hurricanes and less intense but still powerful tropical storms. What happens in the Atlantic isn’t generally representative. In fact, other regions have not enjoyed the vacation that our most susceptible coastlines have had from serious storms. Ask the people in Taiwan and China, who just got hit by a supertyphoon named Nepartak (“supertyphoon” is, approximately, the western Pacific label for what we would call a major hurricane).