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Inscrutable Sandy

Inscrutable Sandy

Today’s Dallas Morning News published an AP story it headlined “Scientists wonder whether global warming played role” in “East Coast Superstorm” Sandy. The News’s headline implied that climate scientists are scratching their heads, perplexed about whether climate change  had anything to do with an unprecedented, 1000-mile-wide, record-breaking storm.  Like other media, the News  publishes what  audiences want to hear, including Exxon readers and other  people whose jobs depend on producing  greenhouse gases.

The AP story itself is less ambivalent, talking  about ocean water  nearly a foot higher and two degrees warmer than a century ago. Scientists years ago  warned that global warming was raising New York sea levels as it heated earth’s atmosphere, making the city “highly vulnerable to extreme hurricane flooding.”  Ocean water expands when heated, and warm water and warm air fuel storms, so extra heat increases the odds of super storms like Sandy trashing eastern seacoasts. The  causal link between broiling the planet with fossil fuels and more powerful storms merits a “duh,” but  decision makers haven’t pay attention.

Climate science is clear that the Earth is getting warmer and that human activities are the primary cause. What, if anything, to do about climate change is a  far more difficult issue involving politics, economics, generational equity and religion.  Even if governments decide that global warming must be slowed and then stopped, formulating and implementing action plans for managing Earth’s complex natural systems would be the biggest challenge ever for modern civilization.

There are rationales for  ignoring  messages nature is giving about climate change.  Price tags to even begin fixing what man has caused are high, the future is uncertain, natural systems are complicated – all true, but time may show that man’s passivity in the face of global warming was terribly expensive.

Image by Master Sgt. Mark C. Olsen/U.S. Air Force/New Jersey National Guard (Flickr) [CC-BY-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

 
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Comments (2)

  1. Stephen Lerer Friday - 02 / 11 / 2012
    The environmental fact is that we have more and more extreme weather conditions. Hurricane Sandy is the latest example. There have been 100-year floods and storms every few years. The concept of "global warming' causes a debate. The concept of protecting ourselves is not open to debate. We have to focus on how best to minimnize these extremes and protect ourselves.
    • Grier Raggio Tuesday - 23 / 10 / 2018
      We have much strong evidence in the past six years of climate change, but there is no wide support for doing anything except ignoring Mother Nature's irritability.

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