Many deniers are immune to reality.
Thanks for this Chris but it seems incredibly optimistic to think this will end climate change denial or even reduce it that much. Rationalization is another human characteristic.
Climatology being a statistical science its difficult to tie any one event to global warming. But a couple of factors that went into making Sandy what it was bear some examination.
There is evidence that the loss of Arctic sea ice is affecting the jet stream making the amplitude of the Rossby waves larger and slowing down the jet stream. In the case of Sandy the blocking high over Greenland that forced Sandy to make a hard left turn into the coast of New Jersey and the Arctic air from the west that lead to heavy snowfall in the southern Appalachians were effects of the Rossby waves.
Also the ocean surface temperature anomaly off the East Coast was plus 3-5 degrees Fahrenheit so energy was available to sustain Sandy as it worked its way north and that probably helped make the size of it as large as it was (the darn thing was about 1000 miles across on Monday). Without that extra energy Sandy may have petered out as it worked its way north or at least been much smaller than it was.
So Sandy gets worked into the overall climatological statistics and 5 or 10 years from now in retrospect we will be able say that it was a part of the statistical increase in extreme weather but I don't expect the hard core deniers to change. But maybe some of the majority of people who aren't paying that much attention will start to do so now and the imperative to take some action will strengthen a bit. I just hope by the time we really get serious we will still be able to save our civilization.
BTW, I was rather amused by a typo in your second paragraph where you wrote:
"And a public that is insufficiently illiterate in the complexity of the science...
