Now that the true extent of the devastation unleashed by Hurricane then extratropical hybrid storm Sandy is apparent, 50 billion USD or more in damage, and at least 90 fatalities (there are still people missing who were washed away in NYC), it's possible to put it in perspective, and to see how the US public and government are processing it.
We here at the APR view this storm as one of the most globally sigificant weather/climate events of the last five years, not as much in the death/destruction she wrought, but because it is making more people take notice of global warming. And starting to wonder, will we be able to protect our coastal cities from flooding in the decades to come from rising sea levels and stronger storms?
The other most significant events of the past five years were the Australian Heat Wave/Wildfires in 2009,
the Drought/Wildfires in Russia 2010 combined with flooding in Pakistan,
and the two year drought in first Texas and the southwestern US in 2011, then in almost all of the western and central US in 2012.
This article from the Climate Central website a few days ago offers a great overview of all the features of Sandy that made her so unique and devastating. Along with some input from prominent researchers in the climate change/modeling and atmospheric sciences fields.
How Global Warming Made Hurricane Sandy Worse
Published: October 31st, 2012 , Last Updated: October 31st, 2012
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By Andrew Freedman
As officials begin the arduous task of pumping corrosive seawater out of New York City’s subway system and try to restore power to lower Manhattan, and residents of the New Jersey Shore begin to take stock of the destruction, experts and political leaders are asking what Hurricane Sandy had to do with climate change. After all, the storm struck a region that has been hit hard by several rare extreme weather events in recent years, from Hurricane Irene to “Snowtober.”
Photo of coastal flooding along the New Jersey shore, taken from a New Jersey Air National Guard Helicopter.
Credit: NJNG/Scott Anema.
Scientists cannot yet answer the specific question of whether climate change made Hurricane Sandy more likely to occur, since such studies, known as detection and attribution research, take many months to complete. What is already clear, however, is that climate change very likely made Sandy’s impacts worse than they otherwise would have been.
There are three different ways climate change might have influenced Sandy: through the effects of sea level rise; through abnormally warm sea surface temperatures; and possibly through an unusual weather pattern that some scientists think bore the fingerprint of rapidly disappearing Arctic sea ice.
If this were a criminal case, detectives would be treating global warming as a likely accomplice in the crime.
Warmer, Higher Seas
Water temperatures off the East Coast were unusually warm this summer — so much so that New England fisheries officials observed significant shifts northward in cold water fish such as cod. Sea surface temperatures off the Carolinas and Mid-Atlantic remained warm into the fall, offering an ideal energy source for Hurricane Sandy as it moved northward from the Caribbean. Typically, hurricanes cannot survive so far north during late October, since they require waters in the mid to upper 80s Fahrenheit to thrive.
Scientists said about 1°F out of the 5°F East Coast water temperature anomaly may have been due to manmade global warming. Warmer seas provide more water vapor for storms to tap into; this water vapor can later be wrung out as heavy rainfall, resulting in flooding.
The most damaging aspect of the storm was the massive storm surge that struck the coastline from Massachusetts to Maryland. Global warming-related sea level rise gave the surge a higher launching pad than it would have had a century ago, making it more damaging than it otherwise would have been. This is only going to get worse as sea level rise continues as a result of warming ocean waters and melting polar ice caps and glaciers.
A water vapor satellite image of Superstorm Sandy on Tuesday, Oct. 30.
Credit: Stu Ostro/Facebook.
Or, to put it in simpler terms, the water level reached 9.15 feet above the average high tide line.
Katharine Hayhoe, a climate researcher at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, said manmade climate change likely contributed to the storm surge at The Battery in Lower Manhattan, with 1 foot 3 inches of long-term sea level rise recorded at that location, the result of manmade sea level rise, sinking land, and ocean currents. She said the manmade contribution to the storm surge may have been a small amount.
But to the Metropolitan Transit Authority or Con Ed, the main electric utility in Manhattan, each inch of sea level rise matters a great deal.
If a similar storm were to strike New York in 2050, it would cause even more damage, since sea levels are expected to be considerably higher by midcentury. In fact, a recent study found that sea level rise has taken place at an accelerated rate at locations north of Norfolk, Va., and if this pace continues the Northeast could see much higher sea levels than other parts of the East Coast by midcentury.
A 2012 report by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) found that sea level rise has likely increased extreme coastal high water events around the world.
By warming the seas and the atmosphere, global warming is also expected to alter hurricane frequency and strength, making North Atlantic hurricanes slightly more powerful, while reducing the overall number of storms during coming decades. Detecting such changes in the observational record is difficult, considering the varying ways people have kept tabs on hurricanes prior to the era of hurricane hunter aircraft flights and satellite imagery? A recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that warmer sea surface temperatures are tied to an increase in stronger Atlantic hurricanes.
“Blocked” Weather Pattern
In addition, an unusual weather pattern in the northern hemisphere steered the storm in an unprecedented direction, as it made a dramatic — and for many East Coast residents, catastrophic — left hook right into coastal New Jersey. The east to west movement, which is exactly the opposite of how weather systems normally move in this area, helped maximize the storm surge, since a strong easterly air flow struck the coast at a right angle.
Satellite loop from the University of Wisconsin, showing Hurricane Sandy as it made landfall in New Jersey.
The upper air flow over the Atlantic Ocean was temporarily jammed by a powerful area of high pressure near Greenland and a storm system in the Central Atlantic, leaving the storm no escape route away from the U.S. Such patterns are known as “blocking” events, and they have occurred with increasing regularity and intensity in recent years. Blocking patterns have been linked to several noteworthy extreme weather events, such as the deadly 2010 Russian heat wave and Pakistan floods, the 2003 European heat wave, and the March heat wave of 2012 in the U.S. [and are a factor in increasing the frequency/strength of our windstorms here in S-Central Alaska, eds..]
In this case, the blocking pattern, occurred at precisely the wrong time — when a hurricane was moving out of the Caribbean.
Weather Channel hurricane expert Bryan Norcross wrote about this on Oct. 26. “The freak part is that a hurricane happens to be in the right place in the world to get sucked into this doubled-back channel of air and pulled inland from the coast,” he said. “And the double-freak part is that the upper-level wind, instead of weakening the storm and simply absorbing the moisture — which would be annoying enough — is merging with the tropical system to create a monstrous hybrid vortex. A combination of a hurricane and a nor’easter.”
Some, though not all, scientists think the more frequent blocking events be related to the loss of Arctic sea ice, which is one of the most visible consequences of manmade global warming. The 2012 sea ice melt season, which ended just one month ago, was extreme, with sea ice extent, volume, and other measures all hitting record lows. The loss of sea ice opens large expanses of open water, which then absorbs more of the incoming solar energy and adds heat and moisture to the atmosphere, thereby helping to alter weather patterns. Exactly how sub-Arctic weather patterns are changing as a result, however, is a subject of active research.
Some researchers who warn that climate change is already being felt in extreme weather events, such as Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., are not yet convinced of the Arctic connection. Others, such as Hayhoe, think it is a “plausible theory” that is worth investigating, although she noted there is evidence that Arctic warming may cause more blocking during the winter rather than during the fall.
James Overland, a scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who recently published a study on how Arctic sea ice loss is altering the weather in the Far North, said it’s not clear whether Hurricane Sandy was just a freak event or a sign of things to come. “What was highly unusual to me was the slowing down of the jet stream that normally turns hurricanes out to sea, allowing Sandy to directly [make] landfall,” he said in an email conversation. Yet, he said it’s important to recognize that there is still a huge role played by randomness, or chaos, in global weather patterns. “Having looked at a lot of weather maps, I don’t think it’s entirely legitimate to make a big possibility for an Arctic connection with Sandy rather than the chaos default,” he said.
And while climate change has undoubtedly altered the background conditions in which all weather systems are born, scientists said that natural variability still plays a very large role, and may have been the dominant factor with Hurricane Sandy.
Martin Hoerling, a researcher at the Earth Systems Research Laboratory, also in Boulder, is a proponent of this view. “Great events, like this meteorological one, can happen with little cause(s). Individually, neither the tropical storm nor the extratropical storm that embraced it, were unusual,” he said via email. “What makes this a rare, perhaps once in a lifetime event, is the fortuity of their timely (“untimely” as far as most are concerned who sit in harms way) intersection.” Randall M. Dole, who is a colleague of Hoerling's at ESRL, noted that the blocking pattern that helped steer Sandy was "highly transient," which suggests to him that it was just "random bad luck" that it coincided with a hurricane along the East Coast.
Regardless of the chain of events that led to this disaster, Hurricane Sandy is almost certain to wind up being one of the top 10 costliest hurricanes on record, and it comes soon after Munich Re, a global insurance giant, warned of increasing natural disaster losses in the U.S., a trend the company said is related to global climate change.
And regardless of unequivocal linkages between this particular storm and manmade climate change, questions related to future human-caused changes — how they will make this type of event more likely and destructive, through a combination of sea level rise, extreme weather trends, and vulnerability of coastal populations and infrastructure, deserve to be asked and may be much easier to answer.
This image, above, shows the areas that were flooded in NYC, with green the most shallow (not sure of the scaling), and orange the deepest. As we saw, the highest recorded storm surge levels were about 9.2 feet above mean high tide levels. What is this map going to look like when a storm in 2040 buffets the same area when mean sea levels are five feet higher? Ten feet higher? It's highly possible that could happen, as the Greenland Ice Sheet's stability is now in question. Massive pieces of it breaking apart and melting are going to be a real problem in the coming decades as Arctic warming continues to accelerate. For a time last summer, temperatures were above freezing over the entire ice/land mass, and melting was occurring even on it's higher elevations. This melt-water then infiltrates through the ice sheets, and lubricates the bases of them.
Bill McKibben puts the disaster we are calling Sandy in good perspective in the following article, showing that some politicians and corporate media may be getting the message. Will it help tip the scales, so that more people can think of the bigger picture? That the only way we are going to solve problems like this is through abandoning greed as the motive force in societies. And realising that the only stable and sustainable economies are/will be ones that place primary emphasis on meeting people's basic needs and protection of the environment for future generations.
Published on Thursday, November 1, 2012 by The
New York Review of Books
A Grim Warning from Science
rescue efforts.
Sandy, by contrast, has been pretty straightforward. It’s hit rich, poor, and middle class Americans with nearly equal power, though of course the affluent always have it easier in the aftermath of tragedy. Government officials prepared forthrightly for its arrival, and have refrained from paralysis and bickering in its wake. Which allows us to concentrate on the only really useful message it might deliver: that we live in a changed world, where we need both to adapt to the changes, and to prevent further changes so great that adaptation will be impossible.
Science and its practical consort Engineering mostly
come out of this week with enhanced reputations. For some years now, various
researchers have been predicting that such a trauma was not just possible but
almost certain, as we raised the temperature and with it the level of the
sea—just this past summer, for instance, scientists demonstrated that seas were
rising faster near the northeast United States (for reasons having to do with
alterations to the Gulf Stream) than almost anyplace on the planet. They had
described, in the long run, the loaded gun, right down to a set of documents
describing the precise
risk to the New York subway system.
In so doing, it should shame at least a little those people who argue against the computer modeling of climate change on the grounds that “they can’t even tell the weather three days ahead of time—how can they predict the climate?” But in fact “they” can tell the weather, and in the process they saved thousands upon thousands of lives. They can tell the future too. No serious climate scientist believes that the sea will rise less than a meter this century, unless we get off fossil fuel with great speed; many anticipate it will rise far more. Think about what that means—as one researcher put it this week, it means that any average storm will become an insidious threat.
[It's already been established that global sea levels were 5-7 metres higher 128,000 years ago, when CO2 levels were also at 390 ppm, due to naturally occuring volcanism.http://akprogressive.blogspot.com/2009/12/what-seems-likely-based-on-what-weve.html
We'll be at 550 ppm by 2050, will global sea levels have risen 5-7 metres, or more, by then? It's quite possible, due to the melting/instability of the Greenland ice sheets. How will humanity adapt? eds..]
We'll be at 550 ppm by 2050, will global sea levels have risen 5-7 metres, or more, by then? It's quite possible, due to the melting/instability of the Greenland ice sheets. How will humanity adapt? eds..]
It’s possible that we can spend enough money to
somehow protect Manhattan—and it’s possible that we can’t. It’s impossible to
imagine that we will be able to protect, say, the Asian subcontinent, or the
Pearl River delta of China, or any of the other crowded places imperiled by
rising seas. In fact, the last year has seen even more serious flooding in
Bangkok and Manila, and a recent
study found that New York was only seventeenth on the list of cities at risk
of such flooding, with Mumbai and Calcutta leading the league.
Having great scientists, and taking those scientists
seriously, are two different things, of course. Our climate scientists—led by
James Hansen, who lives in New Jersey and does his work from a NASA lab on the
Upper West Side—have trotted patiently up to Capitol Hill every year for the
last two decades to present their latest findings, and been entirely ignored,
the fossil fuel industry having purchased one of our political parties and cowed
the other. But it may be that firsthand experience will accomplish what academic
studies have not—Governor Andrew Cuomo, for instance, was forthright in his declarations
this week that climate change was a “reality,” that we were “vulnerable” as a
result, and that we would need to adjust to deal with it.
Building new defenses will be expensive but
relatively popular; cracking down on the fossil fuel industry will be a great
trial, and indeed Cuomo has an important test approaching. He must decide at
some point in the coming years whether to allow fracking
within the borders of the Empire State. A lead author of a very weak report from
his Department of Environmental Conservation is a climate
denier; after Sandy it will be interesting to see if the governor asks for a
new study from people in touch with actual science. I think he might; as
powerful as the fracking lobby is, the sight of a hundred apartment and office
lobbies filled with seawater is more visceral. We’ve been given a warning by
science, and a wake-up call by nature; it is up to us now to heed them.
© 2012 The New York Review of Books
