That’s kind of a broad sweeping statement, which is kind of ironic coming from someone complaining about broad sweeping statements! “Lack of data” about what? Just exactly what is it that is being claimed that is wrong? Do you think that climatologists have any doubt that warm sea surface temperatures are the engines that power hurricanes? Do you think there’s any doubt that global warming is raising SSTs?
To be sure, hurricane formation involves many complex factors beyond just SSTs, but when Al Gore said in An Inconvenient Truth that hurricane Katrina was (I’m paraphrasing from memory) “like the kinds of weather events we can expect more of in the future” – a statement for which he was much vilified – he was stating a broad scientific consensus about future climate, not trying to attribute a single weather event to climate change. I address this in more detail below, in response to your other erroneous claim.
This is called “moving the goal posts”, because the primary argument is about hurricane energies, not hurricane numbers, and indeed it’s possible that mid-atmosphere dynamics like wind shear may actually reduce the number of hurricanes with increased land-ocean warming, but those that do form will tend to be more energetic and destructive.
I previously commented on that article, but my comments were in the Pit and, shall we say, were Pit-appropriate, not so much with respect to the article but with respect to another poster. So rather than linking to it, here is a family-friendly version: 
The article isn’t really wrong but it’s not very well written, and whether it was intentional or not, it’s misleading, all the more so when one cherry-picks selective quotes out of it.
One problem is that it talks about “hurricane activity” but in many of the pronouncements they bounce around between talking about frequency and intensity, and fail to clarify which one they mean. There’s no clear statistically meaningful trend in hurricane frequency (more hurricanes have formed in the Atlantic basin in the last decade than in the previous half-century of comprehensive satellite observations, but only by a narrow margin), but there’s a very clear trend in North Atlantic hurricane energy (particularly as measured by the PDI, the Power Dissipation Index) which the article mentions but doesn’t highlight clearly enough. A strong source for that is the work of Kerry Emanuel, one of the world’s foremost hurricane researchers:
Emanuel (2005) found a strong correlation between the North Atlantic PDI to tropical Atlantic sea surface temperature (SST; r2 = 0.65) … Klotzbach (2006) found a significant increasing linear trend in North Atlantic ACE over the period 1986–2005 (see also Wu et al. 2008), and a statistically significant correlation between North Atlantic SST and ACE.
In the Atlantic, potential intensity, low-level vorticity, and vertical wind shear strongly covary and are also highly correlated with sea surface temperature
ftp://texmex.mit.edu/pub/emanuel/PAPERS/Factors.pdf
There’s no doubt that rising SSTs are due to rising global temperatures, and the correlation with higher hurricane energies in the North Atlantic is very strong. It’s true that some have questioned the attribution of elevated SSTs in the North Atlantic as the current primary factor in increased hurricane energies so far, as opposed to SST differentials with other ocean basins, yet few question the fundamental long-term role of high SSTs as the engines of hurricane formation. Most acknowledge the likelihood that Atlantic hurricanes will become stronger by the end of the century, along with other forms of extreme weather.
I know the article is from GFDL which is part of NOAA, but whoever wrote it seems to be of a skeptical mindset and has actually been misleading in a few areas, such as conflating hurricane frequency and intensity metrics, or citing a paper by Chris Landsea on why hurricane frequency numbers may be inflated. No one is citing frequency numbers as a key metric anyway, and furthermore, Landsea isn’t a particularly trustworthy source. He’s a hot-headed contrarian asshole who once quit his assignment at the IPCC when the consensus of authors disagreed with him, accusing them of conspiracies to push an agenda and getting into public shouting matches with renowned scientists.
The article does cite a very good paper by Kerry Emanuel and Michael Mann, but manages to botch that up, too. It summarizes one of its points very poorly and with a denialist mindset. The article says “Mann and Emanuel (2006) hypothesize that a reduction in aerosol-induced cooling over the Atlantic in recent decades may have contributed to the enhanced warming of the tropical North Atlantic”. This makes it sound like Atlantic warming was due to aerosol reductions and not greenhouse gas emissions, but that’s not true and that’s not what the paper says at all. What it says is “late twentieth century tropospheric aerosol cooling has offset a substantial fraction of anthropogenic warming in the region and has thus likely suppressed even greater potential increases in tropical cyclone activity.” – IOW, the paper reaffirms the role of anthropogenic greenhouse gases in raising sea surface temperatures and reaffirms their effect on hurricane formation, which effect would have been even stronger had it not been for aerosol cooling in part of the second half of the 20th century. From the article, the reader might be left with the opposite impression of what the Mann and Emanuel paper was really saying.