Climate Change and Sandy: Why We Need to Prepare for a Warmer World

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After a campaign season in which it was the missing in action issue, climate change roared back into relevancy in the wake of Hurricane Sandy. Bill McKibben, the writer-turned-activist behind 350.org, put it in stark terms. “This is an absolutely unprecedented storm,” he told POLITICO on Monday evening. “This entire year should be a seriously wake-up call—and the public’s beginning to get it.”

Some scientists and science writers, however, were just as quick to caution that we can’t really attribute any single weather event to climate change—and that tropical cyclones like Sandy have proved particularly hard to connect to global warming. Andrew Revkin of Dot Earth drew a clear line against attributing Sandy directly to recent man-made warming, noting that there had been periods in the past when strong hurricanes occurred during cooler years:

There remains far too much natural variability in the frequency and potency of rare and powerful storms — on time scales from decades to centuries – to go beyond pointing to this event being consistent with what’s projected on a human-heated planet.

Of course, we’ll be grappling with the effects of Sandy—which has already killed over 20 people in the U.S. and which could easily top $20 billion in damages—whether or not it has to do with climate change. But the argument over attribution alone misses the point. We know that climate change is real, that it’s happening and that it will make many natural disasters more severe, from coastal flooding to droughts to storms. But the real danger stems from the fact that we’re putting more and more people and property in harm’s way, in built-up coastal cities like New York or Miami or Shanghai. Along with cutting carbon emissions to reduce the risk from climate change, we need to build and maintain a society that is capable that will prove more resilient to extreme weather in the future.


Read more: http://science.time.com/2012/10/30/climate-change-and-sandy-why-we-need-to-prepare-for-a-warmer-world/#ixzz2AoIRtE1d