Pirate's Cove

If only you hadn’t taken that fossil fueled trip to eat and Evil burger, this wouldn’t have happened. If you’d just agree to give your money and freedom to government we could solve this

Climate Change Added $8 Billion to Hurricane Sandy’s Damages

As Hurricane Sandy bore down on the New York City area in 2012, its storm surge swamped lower Manhattan, unmoored a roller coaster on the Jersey Shore, submerged runways at LaGuardia Airport and pushed the toxic waters of Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal into nearby basements. All told, the storm’s floodwaters did more than $60 billion in property damage in New York State, New Jersey and Connecticut. Though scientists have long known global warming is exacerbating such events by raising sea levels, a new study has now calculated just how much of Sandy’s bill can be charged to climate change: about $8 billion.

The paper, published on Tuesday in Nature Communications, developed a modeling method that can be used to determine how much climate change adds to the cost of any coastal storm or other flooding event—past or present. “It’s putting the climate change price sticker on the event where it hasn’t been visible,” says lead author Benjamin Strauss, CEO and chief scientist of Climate Central, a nonprofit research and news organization.

Such research is part of a growing field called attribution science, which uses observations and models to compare our current world with a hypothetical one where climate change has not been happening. This comparison shows how rising temperatures have affected the likelihood and severity of a variety of extreme weather events, from heat waves to floods. Attribution science reveals how climate change is loading the dice, increasing the odds that events will overwhelm our capacity to cope and turn into severe disasters. The new study takes the science a step further, providing a more concrete sense of how much of the damage from such disasters is because of the changing climate—and the price associated with it.

This is being repeated ad nauseum across lots of Credentialed Media outlets, but, none of them mention that by the time Sandy made landfall and was really affecting the Northeast, it was no longer a hurricane. It was being called a Superstorm because it was being supercharged by a massive cold front coming from the northeast, down from the Arctic and through Canada. Nor do they mention that average global temperatures have only gone up 1.5F, nor that sea rise in the Northeastern US states show, at most, slightly more sea rise than you’d expect during a Holocene warm period, and most are around exactly what you’d expect. Nor do they mention that the land is still subsiding post glacial period.

Strauss and his co-authors calculated how much local sea-level rise is linked to an increase in temperature (that is, how much of that rise results from melting polar ice caps and the expansion of the ocean as it absorbs most of the excess heat trapped by greenhouse gases). In the New York City area, warming has caused about four inches of sea-level rise over the past century—about half of the local rise over that time period.

It has? The data for The Battery shows .94 feet per hundred years. Kings Point shows .75 feet. Montauk shows 1.24 feet. It appears as if they’re blaming you for that 4 inches. Which is nuts, because, if they are trying to claim a total of 8 inches over the last 100 years, that is exactly average during the last 8,000 years, which means much less during a warm period, since a cold period would have much lower sea rise.

The team then used computer models to relate various sea levels to flooding damage and (because Sandy’s damage was almost entirely from flooding) to estimates of how much of the tab came from climate change.

Using a sea-level-rise mapping tool developed by Climate Central…

Computer models based on more computer models based on preconceived notions. So, full mule fritters.