Climate scientists warn that global warming is likely to increase the incidence of serious events like Hurricane Sandy. Warming water and rising sea levels may be contributing to what New York politicians are calling their 'new reality.'?
This NOAA satellite image taken Tuesday, shows superstorm Sandy slowly moving westward while weakening across southern Pennsylvania.
AP Photo/NOAA
EnlargeClimate?scientist Michael Oppenheimer stood along the Hudson River and watched his research come to life as Hurricane Sandy blew through New York.
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Just eight months earlier, the Princeton University professor reported that what used to be once-in-a-century devastating floods in New York City would soon happen every three to 20 years. He blamed global warming for pushing up sea levels and?changing?hurricane patterns.
New York "is now highly vulnerable to extreme hurricane-surge flooding," he wrote.
For more than a dozen years, Oppenheimer and other?climate?scientists have been warning about the risk for big storms and serious flooding in New York. A 2000 federal report about global warming's effect on the United States warned specifically of that possibility.
Still, they say it's unfair to blame?climate?change?for Sandy and the destruction it left behind. They cautioned that they cannot yet conclusively link a single storm to global warming, and any connection is not as clear and simple as environmental activists might contend.
"The ingredients of this storm seem a little bit cooked by?climate?change, but the overall storm is difficult to attribute to global warming," Canada's University of Victoria?climate?scientist Andrew Weaver said.
Some individual parts of Sandy and its wrath seem to be influenced by?climate?change, several?climate scientists said.
First, there's sea level rise. Water levels around New York are a nearly a foot (0.3 meters) higher than they were 100 years ago, said Penn State University?climate?scientist Michael Mann.
Add to that the temperature of the Atlantic Ocean, which is about 2 degrees Fahrenheit (.8 degrees Celsius) warmer on average than a century ago, said Katharine Hayhoe, a?climate?scientist at Texas Tech University. Warm water fuels hurricanes.
And Sandy zipped north along a warmer-than-normal Gulf Stream that travels from the Caribbean to Ireland, said Jeff Masters, meteorology director for the private service Weather Underground.
Meteorologists are also noticing more hurricanes late in the season and even after the season. A 2008 study said the Atlantic hurricane season seems to be starting earlier and lasting longer but found no explicit link to global warming. Normally there are 11 named Atlantic storms. The past two years have seen 19 and 18 named storms. This year, with one month to go, there are 19.
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