Is Sandy A Climate Game Changer?

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Phil Plait sees an opening amidst all the “political opportunism with this storm”:

I am not a fan of such parasitism; latching on to an opportunity under the thinnest of pretense to trump a partisan view. However, let me be clear: we just had the world’s biggest metaphor come ashore in the United States. Years of outright climate change denial and faux skepticism will hopefully be shaken by this event. Sea ice melting happens far away; droughts, fires, shifting weather is unpredictable and difficult to grasp; statistical graphs are easily manipulated by special-interest groups and generally difficult to interpret anyway. But a hurricane a thousand miles across doing tens of billions of dollars of damage and causing untold chaos is more than a wake up call. It should be a shot of adrenaline into the heart.

But connecting Sandy directly to climate change is complicated, as Christopher Mims explains:

Is climate change causing Hurricane Sandy? The short answer is, a little bit, and possibly a lot, but we don’t know yet and might never know for sure. The slightly longer answer is, unusually warm seas and elevated sea levels are powering up Sandy so that she’s more devastating than she’d otherwise be, and those warmer seas are in part a result of human-caused climate change. Sandy is a “megastorm cake with climate frosting on top,” not entirely attributable to climate change but enhanced by it.  In addition, record Arctic ice melt might be to blame for Sandy’s leftward turn into the North American continent.

Bill McKibben doesn’t have high hopes for government action:

One reason we make so little progress is that we keep waiting for our political leaders to lead. But in this case, “leader” should be used advisedly. Our two presidential candidates have managed to slog through a summer of campaigning that carried them through the hottest month in U.S. history (July) and across a heartland enduring an epic drought.

As they talked, the Arctic melted at a speed that astonished even the most pessimistic climatologists. But it appeared they somehow hadn’t noticed—it was as if they’d acquired some special weatherproof coating. Mitt Romney talked briefly about climate at the RNC—it was his laugh line, when he mocked President Obama for trying to ‘slow the rise of the oceans.’ (Slightly less ha-ha today). And the president sat down at the kid’s table after all the debates, telling MTV he was “surprised” it hadn’t come up at the debates.

I wasn’t surprised. I would have been shocked if either of them had raised the issue, just as I’ll be shocked if Congress ever—ever—breaks its perfect 20-year bipartisan record of accomplishing nothing on the topic. Let’s be entirely clear about what’s going on. Just as the NRA has terrified politicians of talking sensibly about gun laws, so the fossil fuel industry has imposed an effective muzzle on discussions of carbon.

McKibben’s call to action here.

(Photo: Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney holds a bag of donated paper towels during a Kettering Storm Relief event on October 30, 2012 in Kettering, Ohio. In the wake of Hurricane Sandy, Mitt Romney’s campaign has reduced their campaign schedule and are focusing their attention on disaster relief. By Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)