Hurricane Sandy and Global Warming

I thought it was a bit odd when i heard people connecting Sandy to global warming - the mayor of NY even endorsed Obama after Sandy coz he said he had better policies to prevent global warming. But as far as i know, there is no solid evidence thus far that actually connects global warming to increased typhoon activity.

As such, i thought this article was timely:

BY CIRCULATING commentary that suggests hurricane Sandy was exacerbated by human-caused global warming, the Climate Commission is wilfully misleading the public. Let us be clear, Sandy was barely a category 1 hurricane as it crossed the densely populated north-east United States.

The enormous damage resulted not from wind, but from flooding and inundation over low-lying areas where housing and commercial development was not designed to cope with such an extreme event. Compounding the issue, vital infrastructure such as levees, public transport systems and power stations were not adequately hardened.

The flooding resulted from heavy rain and a large coastal storm surge at a time of spring tides, all eventualities that could have been predicted.

Many scientists, and now the Climate Commission, have suggested that in a warmer world tropical storms will be more frequent or more dangerous than those previously experienced. This assertion is contentious, and evidence for it is lacking.
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As has already been stressed by senior scientist Martin Hoerling from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and many other scientists, no evidence exists for any influence of global warming, let alone human-caused warming, on the intensity of hurricane Sandy.

Sandy was a decaying hurricane whose wind intensity was decreasing as it moved north across subtropical waters. Importantly, the presence of a second large weather system in the north-east Atlantic Ocean and Canada blocked the passage of the hurricane and caused its impact and storm surge to be focused in the New Jersey-New York area.

The coincident alignment of a hurricane and a large extra-tropical storm is what gave Sandy its extra intensity.

In a broader context, the lack of recent global warming is also an impediment to those who argue that Sandy was influenced by industrial carbon dioxide. There has been no significant atmospheric warming since 1996 and no ocean warming since the Argo buoy network was deployed in 2003. In consequence, global atmospheric and oceanic temperatures are now close to their average over the past 30 years.

Suggestions that higher concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide have somehow influenced the formation and development of Sandy are therefore simply untrue.

The Climate Commission appears to consider it opportune to use the harrowing Sandy event, with its loss of lives and immense destruction, to push its political agenda. But in favouring action to try to "prevent" global warming, the commission is propagating a wrong and costly message.

The wilful misuse of science by lobby groups to support their agendas has now become an epidemic. The view that more frequent or extreme climate events are occurring, as advanced by many commentators, directly contradicts the considered advice of scores of climate experts, including all those who wrote the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Non-governmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC).

William Kininmonth is a meteorologist and former head of the National Climate Centre. Bob Carter is a palaeoclimatologist and a senior editor of the 2010 NIPCC report, Climate Change Reconsidered.

I agree with the premise of this article, which I take as the statement that, "BY CIRCULATING commentary that suggests hurricane Sandy was exacerbated by human-caused global warming, the Climate Commission is wilfully misleading the public."

But I would also call attention to one of the closing statement, which I equally agree with, that being, "The wilful misuse of science by lobby groups to support their agendas has now become an epidemic."

Global warming has now become a political and ideological issue, when it should be a purely scientific one. I can't see how anyone could possibly claim that Sandy has anything to do with global warming, but then I'm not a scientist so what do I know? No more than any other idiot with a blog.

Here is another excerpt that caught my attention, "In a broader context, the lack of recent global warming is also an impediment to those who argue that Sandy was influenced by industrial carbon dioxide."

I haven't been following the trends in global temperatures, but I do remember one global warming skeptic pointing out that the rise in sea level on low lying Pacific islands was due not so much to sea level rise, but rather to the islands' overuse of groundwater resulting in lowering of land level. That can certainly be argued in the case of SW Taiwan with its fish ponds, which all use ground water.

I've read many 'scientific' reports documenting how, as we do reduce carbon emissions, we will actually increase global warming. Pollution (i.e., human, smoke-stack, exhaust) blocks the sun; it doesn't "block it in". It blocks it out. Remember those theories we were all taught about how the dinosaurs disappeared? I believe it went something like this: There were multiple volcanoes releasing large amounts of ash (later to become an asteroid doing essentially the same), blocking out the sun, lowering temperatures, and killing everything. And then there's the concept of a nuclear winter (lowering world temperatures after a nuclear war.) I've never heard of a nuclear summer.

As this alternative theory goes, as carbon decreases, heat will increase. Perhaps the sun is just heating up? Don't stars do that until they explode? Or perhaps the sun is just in a really happy phase that will last, oh, a few million years.

Ultimately, as crude as this sounds, I don't give a shit about global warming regardless of its cause. For us to think that we can actually control nature. or that we are the caretakers of the earth, is ridiculous. We came out of the earth. I think we should be more focused on how to treat each other in humane ways. In the process of doing that, I think we will act in ways that benefit our environment. Our problem is not that we treat our environment badly, it's that we treat each other badly. After all, each an every one of us are the environment.

But, the problem at hand is that this issue of global warming has been hijacked by anyone who wants to pull an ear to their cause. It's ridiculous. For example, here is an excerpt from the first comment to the article you cited:

Mark, there are literally thousands of scientists working worldwide who are more relevantly qualified who have consistently produced research which points to the likelihood of anthropogenic global warming.

That's not good logic. It's based on the fallacy of an appeal to authority. I know nothing of the science, but thousands of scientists say it's so, so it must be. It's bad logic. Doctors say it is healthy, so it is healthy. The Government says it is legal, so it is legal. The Health Department says the vegetables are pesticide free, and so they are.

Where would such thinking have gotten us 800 years ago?

But, the problem at hand is that this issue of global warming has been hijacked by anyone who wants to pull an ear to their cause. It's ridiculous.

I think that is the salient point. People are always looking for a 'one-size fits all' philosophy to explain the vagaries of the weather (or life and death) and global warming has been used to cover everything from hurricanes to droughts.

For me, the problem is just pollution and respect for nature. Forget about what effects it may or may not have on a grand global scale - pouring chemical waste into the river posions the eco-system of that river - filling the sky with smoke causes acid rain and smog - building hotels on sandy beaches uglifies the natural landscape. That should be enough already without having to consider global warming.

Well put.

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Hurricane Sandy and Global Warming (General)