Climate Change and Weather
A lot of the problem is that people think climate equals weather. Climate is a moving average of weather conditions occuring over a long time span. There are always extreme weather events that occur from time to time. It is healthy to be skeptical but skepticism should be based on open and honest debate.
What is not acceptable is politicizing science, meaning that if we were to vote on whether global warming is real or not would be a pointless excersize. We in the US have managed to elect the least science literate folks as well as the least qualified to lead.
It does help to talk about what is going on with the weather. The idea that more CO2 in the atmosphere collects heat is a start. Hurricanes are driven by heat and wind, two forms of energy that contribute to the intensity of the storms. Another bit of data is that late season hurricanes are not as rare as they were. An indication of change is when a previously normal range of temperature and precipitation become erratic due to going way over or under the normal range with increasing differences going on year over year.
Sandy is a destructive storm. It could be a fluke or it could be a trend; we can only know by observing the conditions. The weather satellites that helped provide the warning about Sandy are have a finite life and are getting close to the end; adding more weather satellites will help improve weather forecasting as well as to monitor small changes that can accumulate to a great effect. If the satellites fail and not replaced then we will be back to less accurate monitoring that would probably fail to give as much warning as the current system did.
