Discussion on:

Resilience lessons from Hurricane Sandy

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...

Hah/oops! Thanks riverat1, fixed the typo.

There are many ways to measure how bad a storm is. Sandy was so big because it never was very well formed and was mostly a category 1 storm. More powerful storms such as Katrina were more compact and its eye was very well formed. Another reason Sandy was so big was because there were very few major hurricanes this season, which left a lot of heat in the Atlantic Ocean to be picked up by Sandy.

You should take a look at the Accumulated Cyclone Energy (ACE) for the earth (see http://www.wunderground.com/hurricane/accumulated_cyclone_energy.asp?basin=gl ). ACE is a measure of the accumulated energy of a storm over time, and the ACE for all hurricanes can be added together to get a total energy measure. You will see that while the global ACE peaked in the mid-90s with a spike around Katrina in 2005, it's now down to about what it was in 1980. Various regions of the planet are up or down relative to that, but the overall trend in the last decade is down.

While it's true that there has only been 1 major hurricane (Cat 3 or above) this year it has been an active season with 19 named storms and 10 hurricanes. As far as energy transfer I think several smaller storms can make up for one larger one.

ACE is an interesting number but I'd be careful about saying how meaningful it is. It is measured by taking the sum of the squares of maximum sustained wind velocity at 6 hour intervals. Where it falls short is it fails to take into account the size of the cyclone and thus ignores the total mass of air being moved by the storm. So it doesn't really measure the total energy in the whole cyclone, just the energy where it's winds are the highest.

The accurate tracking of how many storms happen per year was not really possible until weather satellites became available.

Prior to that many of the storms we now watch on the news that spin in the open ocean, never touching land, would have never been counted. In the past the best you could do is count on harbor reports tracking high surf conditions or ships at sea reporting storm conditions to track a storm at sea.

Hurricane numbers from just 50 years ago, prior to hurricane tracking by planes, fall into that group so making comparisons to todays numbers is not really honest.

Just watching the evening news you can see that in some years fully a third of all storms named and counted never see land. Their existence would not have been known except for planes and satellites.

Even 100 years ago I think there was enough shipping going on that few large tropical storms or hurricanes would have gone completely unnoticed.

Storms at sea reports ended up going to naval commands, harbor masters, etc. depending on the ship reporting it. There was no central report collection point.

All too often the ships that ran into large storms were just lost at sea like the HMS Bounty was last week.

Scientists have deliberately sought out that sort of information in order to fill in the gaps. It's never going to be perfect but we still know more than you apparently think we do.

The overall world climate has changed many times over the eons, all without any input from mankind. We've had warm periods, producing dinosaurs at some points, ice ages, where much of the world was ice-covered! Water has covered much of the earth at times, and been very low at others. Again man had little influence.

However, suddenly, MAN is the culprit for ALL weather changes! How did we somehow SUDDENLY cause all the world's weather to go to hell? Please explain how this came to be! Also, explain how something like sun-spots couldn't be warming our atmosphere and melting the ice-caps, or volcanoes, spewing all sorts of elements, gasses, etc into the air, producing more than man, by the way, has NO effect!

The changes described by mogul264 are changes that occured by natural forces over geologic time, meaning very slowly, usually over tens- or hundreds-of-thousands or even millions of years. What we are seeing today are changes that are accelerated by the past century of pumping ever-increasing amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere from fossil fuel combustion that we use to generate electric power, run our factories/all sorts of industries, power ships, trucks, buses, cars, and heat buildings and homes. The rate of greenhouse gas release into the atmosphere is unparalleled in history - can you imagine how large an amount as billions of tons per a year is? No one who is educated can deny that doing this does not come with eventual consequences that threaten our existence on this planet, i.e. what we have been doing "business as usual" is unsustainable on so many levels.

Time my Ideas are put on paper!!!
Dr. Neil Garland

The creek that runs through the village where I live was virtually bone dry over the summer due to the drought. Now it's barely staying in its banks. We had a brief reprieve from Sandy today when the sun broke through the clouds for a few hours. However, the forecast is for heavy rains again tonight and tomorrow. I'm glad I'm up the hill.

Down the highway about half an hour is a town with it's own on-grid generating station. When the grid goes down, not too uncommon in this area, they flip a switch, and within 15 minutes, everything within town limits (which doesn't include the supermarket) has power again. During our not uncommon power failures, we head there for a dinner out.

I had been thinking in past years of proposing to the village council that the creek might make a sufficient micro-hydro project to be an emergency back-up for just the village, a little micro-grid. However, after this year, I think I am forced to give up on the idea. Farther up the creek is an old mill which was turned into a micro-hydro station. It usually generates enough power to light up a half dozen homes. This year was the first time since the mill was built that there was no water to turn the turbine. Even the big drought in the 50s didn't see the creek get that dry.

The task of designing resilient communities has now gotten much more difficult, but the need is now that much more apparent.

You can talk resilient infrastructure an climate change, but a simple sea-wall would have prevented much of this.

One hurricane, and not a particularly strong one, altough it was quite spread out, that happened to hit one cold front and make landfall during high tide under a full moon, does not make a trend.

When you build your home or business on a barrier island, don't act surprised when a storm surge floods it. Likewise, when you build your business on a island just a few feet above sea level, and then spread miles and miles of underground tunnels way below sea level, don't be surprised when they flood during a storm.

Instead of reporting on one natural disaster in the northeast, why don't you report on the very, very normal weather in the southwest at the same time, and call that a trend?

There's a lake just outside of Austin that has a spillway at 715 feet above mean sea level. There is one subdivision where people have built "lakefront" or "lake view" homes in the 695-710' range. So-called "full" is at 681 feet. These people gripe and moan every 10 years when their homes flood, and expect the government to take care of them. What the heck is wrong with people?

NYC was overdue for a storm like this. They were again told that as recently as June of this year.

http://www.propertycasualty360.com/2012/10/29/nyc-the-most-dangerous-place-in-the-world-for-stor

This event had nothing to do with global warming. It happened in 1938 and there are recorded storms like this hitting New England in October going back to the 1700s.

It has happened before, it will happen again.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_New_England_hurricanes

The storm is more devastating this time because of mans arrogance. We stuffed 1.6 million people onto a low lying island and told them it was ok. We punched holes in the island for vehicle and train tunnels and then blame the great Voldemort of global warming when the tunnels flood in a storm. Give me a break people.

If anything the Federal Flood Insurance program is directly responsible for underwriting the over development of flood prone areas.

Get a grip people and move aside so the adults in the room can clean up the mess and maybe improve development codes for flood prone areas so this much damaged can be avoided the next time.

I got flagged. LOL. Are the temp NFL refs back? Let me guess, flag thrown for excessive honesty. 15 yard penalty and repeat of down.

20,30 years. Maybe 40.

Mostly since the development of weather satellites.

To say there has NEVER been a storm this size is not very honest when the record is so short.

There is evidence of larger storms. Based on the location of ships impacted by it, the 1944 Pacific hurricane, informally known in the military as Cobra, hit ships well over 1,000 miles apart at the same time.

I am positive we are either in a warming or a cooling cycle. The climate isn't going to be static.

People living on a barrier island are in danger of flooding from storms.

And large cities are inherently dangerous. Look how difficult it was to evacuate the city after 9-11 and before Sandy. A dispersed population is at less risk for major catastrophes.

I don't understand the concern about climate change. I don't think there is much actual dispute about it. The dispute is about "Global Warming" which is a terrible term invented by politicians and innacurate.

Of course it is imperative that we all make an effort to plan for and accept the fact that climate change is normal and needs to be a part of our future planning. That is happening but it should be "ramped up" and needs the engineering-scientific community to drive it. It doesn't need politicians to use it for their personal profit as we have seen recently.

I'm saddened by your need to attack Romney on this issue. He certainly is no worse than Obama's use of these concerns to gain financial support of his campaigns.

pretty much not about the environment, but it's politicicizing a natural disaster for the purpose of mocking a politician.

...for the final week of the Presidential campaign. Since this is the 4th or 5th similar comment on Sandy and "climate change" I've read or heard so far this morning, I can only assume that the memo hit sometime yesterday.

Have CNBC on on the background in my office. If I were to be taking a drink every time they mentioned "climate change" in an interview, I'd be wasted already. What does "climate change" have to do with the CEO of Coca-Cola shipping bottled water to disaster areas?

Having nothing else solid to run on, the final pitch for Obama is going to be about "climate change". Kinda funny, considering that 4 years ago we were told that "This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow, and our planet began to heal.

Clearly, another promise unfulfilled.

This has to be the most blatant abuse of relating to weather outside of Al Gore's brain cells. Here is a scientific fact for us; Sandy was a storm! Sandy was big, but not even very powerful as storms go.

What ever happened to thinking "globally" when we make comments about local weather patterns? What ever happened to looking at the entire global picture before hyping a localized event?

I have absolutely no respect for someone who would make the commentary about a storm that Mr. Nelder has done in this article. Honestly, we the people are really just not this stupid.

...except when it serves the agenda of Progressives?

I punched out of the article and went direct to comments reading when I got to the words "Amy Goodman"...

Surely someone has already got the idea: Bring together a mosaic of clips of Mitt Romney talking about Global Warming and it's implications for US and international politics. Broadcast it on Youtube or better a major TV-network. But do it fast and show it before the elections!

G'moring my friends. I find it very curious in that no-one has brought up the accepted fact of the Earth's axis shifting. By doing so it has exposed the polar latitudes to a much higher and longer amount of Solar heating which makes man's puny addition almost laughable.

May I suggest that modifying, or actually eliminating the Gulf stream flow,by the continuing oil spill is bound to have a serious effect, which could be cooling, etc.

hmm it seems that we do have a can full of wriggling worms going every which way to point the finger of guilt to, besides man, who happens to be more convenient..

Oh well, he is a very conveniet and profitable target.

Don Jose de L Mancha

Also, as it was correctly brought up, one must look at the entire planet at the same period, not just North America.

Answer is very simple, and I'm guessing you already know...doesn't fit the control agenda AND there's far more profit to be made on the scam before the majority of people finally catch on.!

Please present any evidence you have that the Earth's axis is shifting to the degree necessary to cause something like this. As far as I know the North Pole is still pointing (nearly) at Polaris. The Earth's axial tilt does change over time between 22.1 and 24.5 degrees and that does have an effect. But the length of a cycle is about 41,000 years so it's not fast enough to make a significant difference over a span of a few centuries. Right now the tilt is in a decreasing phase which tends to make the winters warmer and the summers cooler and overall leads toward cooling. The minimum tilt will be reached around the year 11,800 CE.

...that these events are entirely caused by humans, and thus are justification for political/totalitarian control over and and all human activities. Solar variations, magnetic pole shift, etc can't possibly be blamed on humans, so they are ignored.

Solar variation is well documented and has been for a long time. Sunspot records go back 400 years and we have continuous satellite monitoring since before 1980. There's no evidence that it has varied enough recently to account for the changes we've seen. The temperature increase in the first half of the 20th Century was largely due to an increase in solar irradiance but since then the trend has been slightly down. I just don't see how you can say it's being ignored.

I've never seen any evidence that a shift in the magnetic pole would have any effect on weather or climate (in the same way that a shift in the orbital parameters would). If someone were to present a plausible mechanism for that to occur I'd be interested in seeing it.

There's nothing political about scientific facts, just maybe the way you interpret them.

...when anything contrary to the narrative is either discarded or ignored?

No, it's religion. 100+ years ago, the popular establishment narrative would have been "Look how God is punishing us - You'd better do what we tell you or else!". Today, it's "Global warming causing this - You'd better do what we tell you or else!".

Little has really changed.

G'morning River Rat,, have you taken into calculation the wobble also?

Coffee?

Don Jose de La Mancha

I think scientists would have noticed if the Earth's orbital parameters had changed outside of the expected variations.

Maybe this is what Don is refering to.

http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2009/08/14/earth-wobble-climate.html

Hmm... Interesting read. Thanks. However the article is simply talking about what I brought up in my first response to Don, the axial tilt or obliquity which has a ~41,000 year cycle. There are other orbital parameters that also have an effect on climate and the full theory is referred to as Milankovitch Cycles.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovitch_cycles

None of those acts on a short enough time scale to have a significant effect over just a couple of centuries and if you look at the forcings from all of the components of Milankovitch Cycles together the net effect is a slight cooling bias at the moment.

Here are some links to see what others are saying:

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/10/30/reality-check-who-believes-hurricane-sandy-isis-not-caused-by-global-warming/

Also a quote from an interview with Joe Bastardi (a chief weather forecaster at Weatherbell Analytics):

BASTARDI: My father used to call it the shortcut storm. He said he was confident he would see it before his days were numbered, and he's finally seen it, okay? That's the first thing. Second thing is, get used to it along the East Coast. Maybe not this kind of track, but we are in a perilous time because the Atlantic's warm; the Pacific's cold. It's the 1950s all over again. It has nothing to do with global warming, it has everything to do with nature, and then we'll go back to where we were in the sixties and seventies.
...
Do you realize we had ten major hurricanes run the Eastern Seaboard between '54 and 1960? Six of them in '54 and '55 -- six hurricane hits -- from North Carolina northward. So, you know, the old Bachman-Turner song, You ain't seen nothing yet? If anything, I was too quick on the gun several years ago when I said we were gonna see this type of thing.

He says some similar things on his blog: http://patriotpost.us/opinion/15187

And finally a site where 31,487 American Scientists have questioned the truth of man-made Global Warming: http://www.petitionproject.org/index.php

Which leads me to the subject of my comment. To say that the science is settled immediately proves that the person making the statement is not following the Scientific Method : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method

And name-calling is most certainly NOT a part of true science. It may be acceptable to call people skeptics (which is what a true scientist ALWAYS is), but when we start using the lingo of "deniers" then we are entering the 'Faith" - not - the "Science" realm. The truth is that the science on what is actually driving Global Warming is far from settled when there are other theories out there (Sun activity for just one example).

The truth should be determined by a calm and logical examination of ALL of the facts - NOT - by who can simply scream/mock the loudest or secure the most grant money.

Lastly, I find it intellectually dishonest to equate someone who questions the "Man-Made" theory as a person that questions that Global Warming has been
happening. Although I have worked in software development for many years, my
scholastic background was as a geoscientist - so I would dare say that I believe that
this planet has seen many episodes of Global Warming / Global Cooling throughout
it's existence and don't have a problem with believing that we may be going through
another warming episode currently.

So do not falsely paint me as a person that 'denies" the scientific FACT that your
"homework is missing", just because I question your THEORY that "the dog ate it"!

Looking at the geological record, we are in a very warm period, and have been for around 10,000 years now. Sea level is up by over 200 meters, and if all the ice at both poles melted tomorrow, it would make less than a 10 meter difference.

It has been warmer in the past. It has also been much much colder. Most of the past 5 to 10 Million Years have been much colder. But before that, it was much warmer. The estimates for that time give a temperature average of about 5 degrees C warmer. That period is called the 'Mid Eocene Climactic Optimum'. It was 'optimum' for a reason. The number of species of both plants and animals peaked. Apparently, everything bloomed. That was when horses and camels began.

If all of the polar ice including the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets were to melt sea level would rise about 70 meters (230 feet). If you're going to argue at least get your facts straight.

Spot on. "Man Made" global warming has indeed become a religion of faith not science.

Regardless of "Global warming", "Climate Change", what Romney said or Obama did, the fact remains that 60 million of our brothers and sisters are affected by this monstrous storm. 40 people have lost their lives. Please............ let us say a prayer for their safety and for those departed. Think of what we can do to help these unfortunate people.

That's what Chris Nelder is telling you here, let there be no doubt.

No high tide, no flooded subway tunnels. Clear?

Chris Nelder said: "When this is all over and the reckoning begins, its going to be as hard to find a climate change denier in the wreckage as it is to find an atheist in a foxhole."

Wouldn't most people on this site be contemptuous of foxhole converts? And don't foxhole converts tend to return to atheism once danger is past? Perhaps exploiting this human tendency explains the constant media barrage equating far-flung isolated weather disasters to anthropogenic global climate change (AGCC). The US East Coast had an unusually gorgeous spring this year. Why wasn't that attributed to AGCC?

Distributing the power grid by having millions of people run generators is a terrible idea, for a lot of reasons. First, casualties from the generators would far outnumber casualties from power outages. Second, it would be horrifically expensive. Third, outages of major distribution lines are few and quickly fixed. It's all the local distribution lines that take so long to repair after damaging storms. Distributing the electricity generation won't help. Fourth, even during normal times, distributed generators would be MORE prone to damage, breakdown, vandalism, etc. compared to a few centralized generators. Sure, fewer people would be affected at any given time from distributed generation breakdowns, but the overall people-hours of downtime would go up. Fifth, if these distributed generators were diesel then you'd have MORE pollution and CO2, not less. If instead you made them wind or solar, then they'd be useless during the very weather emergencies we're talking about here.

We want to aim for Hydrogen/Solar generators. Use solar cells to generate hydrogen, then use the h2 in fuel cells to make electricity. The military is pursuing this technology for battlefield use, and we should for emergency situations.

In most applications it probably more efficient to use the electricity generated by solar cells directly, but hydrogen could be used for overnight storage of solar generated power.

Having lived in the NYC area, and being an Engineer, I wonder about something.

Yes, the subways and the tunnels are below sea level. They are equipped with pumps, however. The tunnels will be emptied out within hours after the power is restored. It is the same with the subways. So, why the long predicted delays on getting the systems working again?

New York City will just not function without the Subways. The streets are not wide enough to allow both cars and all the people who have to move from place to place. The tunnels can wait for a while, but, the Subways are vital for that area.

...salt water and electronics do not play well together.

Seawater can be very corrosive for systems and materials never designed to deal with salt water immersion. Even when limited to short term exposure.

The subway tunnels have to be drained and everything should be given a freshwater flush before/during repairs.

Proper water tight storm gates at all of the tunnel access points would have limited the damage. Backed up by independently powered pumps the tunnels might have stood a chance of seeing a fast post storm recovery.

They did not even move the train cars to high ground. A few hundred of them ended up in up to 6 feet of salt water in a rail yard. The electric motors on all of them are under the cars. It may be months before those cars are usable.

realise how much wter you are talking about. it is not like draining pool dude.we are talking days if not weeks to pump them out . not to to forget presure diffrence that has to be stable or run the risk of colapse

I saw one video of water flowing down from a ramp about half a story high, into one of the tunnels. Didn't make much sense at all to me. If it was a flood, wouldn't the water have risen starting at street level and then entered the tunnel at its opening. Or was water being pushed up from the sewers and water mains? I didn't see any video showing 13 foot high currents coming down the streets of Lower Manhattan. I saw only the water barely lapping above the pavement at Battery Park.

I am not questioning the extent of the damage, but the video evidence paints a puzzling story of what actually happened!