Hurricane Sandy: Was climate change to blame?

“It’s global warming, stupid,” said Paul Barrett in Bloomberg Businessweek. If there is any silver lining to Hurricane Sandy, the 1,000-mile-wide super-storm that has left at least 106 dead, up to $50 billion in damage, and millions of homes without power across New York and New Jersey, it’s that we can finally stop squabbling about whether climate change is real. Hurricanes draw their energy from the warmth of the sea, and this year brought record-high ocean temperatures. Sandy emerged very late in the hurricane season, yet swelled into the strongest recorded storm ever to make landfall in the Northeast, inundating New Jersey and the New York metropolitan area in a tsunami-like surge that filled the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel with 12 feet of water, flooded every downtown subway tunnel, and devastated dozens of communities. This will surely be a “galvanizing moment” for public attitudes on climate change, said Bettina Boxall in the Los Angeles Times. The nation has seen a hurricane leave our greatest city dark and under water, a few months after 110-degree temperatures and severe drought withered half the U.S. “It’s getting more and more difficult for people to deny what everybody sees with their own eyes,” says climatologist Scott Mandia. “People are starting to connect the dots.”

That’s “misleading, if not downright naïve,” said Ben Garrett in the New York Post. These kinds of “extreme weather events have plagued mankind for all recorded history.” Back in the mid-1950s, three massive hurricanes hit New York in the space of two years—two in the same month—and we saw fewer storms make landfall in the region during the 2000s than in the 1990s. Nor was Sandy, by herself, “an unprecedentedly powerful hurricane,” said NationalReview.com in an editorial. In a freak coincidence, she just happened to arrive “at the confluence of a nor’easter and a high-pressure system,” and, unfortunately for New York, at the peak of the monthly full-moon high tide. That’s what caused all the flooding. This was nature and a bit of chance at work—not proof of humanity’s imminent self-inflicted demise. Sadly, “it is the nature of hysterical alarmists to exceed the bounds of reason.”

Tell that to the insurance industry, said Mark Fischetti in ScientificAmerican.com. One of the world’s largest reinsurance firms, Munich Re, recently warned that climate change is driving a “rising number of natural catastrophes,” especially in North America. Climate scientists are also starting to “drop the caveats” in linking extreme weather to climate change. Climate science can be complicated stuff, said Brad Plumer in WashingtonPost.com, but some aspects of it are quite simple. Global warming may not have caused Hurricane Sandy, but it very likely made it stronger, and it’s certainly to blame for the fact that the water in New York Harbor is a foot higher than it was a century ago. Warmer sea water expands in volume, and also melts Arctic ice, raising sea levels. If Sandy had struck in 1912 instead of 2012, there would have been a smaller storm surge—and a lot less flooding and a lot less damage.

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Even devastation this severe won’t change our society’s fuel-burning habits, said Eugene Robinson in The Washington Post. “The global economy runs on carbon,” so a strict limit on emissions isn’t going to happen for years, or even decades. So it may be time for New York to follow the lead of London and the Netherlands and build a storm-surge barrier across the mouth of its harbor. It would cost billions, “but what price is too high to protect one of the great financial and cultural centers of the world?”

Clearly, we have to do something—not only in New York City, but in coastal communities throughout the country, said Bryan Walsh in Time.com. The climate appears to be changing, and though we can’t be sure how fast the Earth will warm, “we don’t demand absolute certainty before we take action on foreign policy, the economy, or health.” It’s time to start adapting by moving development back from the shore, building higher seawalls, and engineering storm resilience into power lines, tunnels, and housing. We’d be fools to wait for another catastrophic wake-up call.