MOBILE, Alabama — The dread, unspoken but real, starts growing along the Gulf Coast at this time of year. The dread isn’t helped when the first sentence of a New Orleans Times-Picayune story says: “Temperatures off the coast of southeast Louisiana hit bathtub range last week.”

High Gulf water temperatures — “the highest sea surface temperatures ever documented by a longtime wave monitoring group,” the Aug. 5 article says, and 5 degrees warmer than the upper range of what is already considered seriously “above normal” — mean that hurricanes are more likely to develop, and also more likely to be more powerful.