ABC 7 Senior Meteorologist Robert Thomas Ryan (aGa "Bob Ryan") will concede this much about Hurricane Earl: "It's a dangerous storm. There's no question that it's a very dangerous storm."

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That said, Ryan would like to raise a question about just how government instrumentalities and perhaps the media have treated this Atlantic beast. And that question bubbles up from history, more specifically from Hurricane Katrina, a national tragedy that exposed weaknesses in the country's emergency preparedness. In light of Katrina, caution in dealing with big storms makes sense.

To a point, says Ryan: "Are the emergency managers and the public authorities making different decisions now because we don't want to have any repeat of what happened with Katrina?" And what about the Old Dominion? "Did the governor of Virginia really need to declare a state of emergency when the probability of Earl making landfall in Virginia was very low?"

For the record, Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell declared the state of emergency on Wednesday but did note that the motive was "precautionary." In fact, McDonnell declared, "The current forecast has Hurricane Earl passing east of Virginia later this week. However, a change in the storm's path could bring hazardous weather conditions to eastern Virginia. This declaration is a precautionary move which will allow state agencies to be ready just in case resources are needed."

Even so, a state of emergency is a state of emergency. No gubernatorial mitigation is going to water it down!

In raising these issues about the high state of awareness on Hurricane Earl, Ryan isn't trying to position himself as a opinionmonger, a provocateur. He professes no ambition to appear on Sunday morning talk shows, though I haven't pressed him on that very point.

What Ryan is raising, rather, is the need for people in positions of authority to take a closer look at the science of big storms like Earl. Here's the skinny on this front: The state of prognostication regarding how hurricanes lose and gain steam isn't all that advanced. Meteorologists simply can't say with precision, for instance, whether a storm is going to generate stronger or weaker winds over the next 24 or 48 hours.

What the scientists can say with a comfortable level of certainty, however, is what path the storm is likely to take."Predicting the path of these storms has gotten better over the past 15 to 20 years. It's gotten a lot better," says Ryan. In mid-week, accordingly, meteorologists maintained "reasonable confidence" that the center of Earl would stay off the coast.

And here's where we get into some cool, Ryanesque meteorology. A hurricane's northeast quadrant -- and, indeed, its east side -- are the strongest and most violent components. The west side, not quite so vicious. Consider, too, that Earl spans about 400 miles in diameter. So if the center of the storm isn't even going to hit land, its most powerful winds could be several hundred miles off the coast. "There was never any projection from National Hurricane Center that the center or core would be hitting land," says Ryan.

At this point in the discussion, Ryan digressed into some great technicalities about "probability distribution functions." Those relate, somehow, to the amount of error in the projection of a hurricane's path.

As this story was being prepared, Earl had been downgraded to a Category 2 storm but was hitting the North Carolina coast with some pretty good body blows. It was then expected to take a "classic recurve," out into the Atlantic, where it would be sure to bother far fewer people. [Update 11:40 a.m.: Earl weakened to a Category 1 hurricane late Friday morning, with winds of 85 mph.]

Meaning that the storm is pretty much following the path that forecasters had laid out earlier this week -- a vindication for Ryan's profession. That's the point here: Ryan has no bone to pick with Bob McDonnell. As a veteran weatherman, he's not motivated by politics nor driven by animus toward perhaps-hastily-called-states-of-emergency. No, Ryan just wants to stick up for the science of weather forecasting, especially one of its fortes.