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"  Just one year after Hurricane Irene battered the East Coast, Superstorm Sandy shredded parts of New York and New Jersey. It&amp;#039;s also left many people wondering why.  &amp;quot;Every two years, we have a 100-year flood,&amp;quot; New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said in a press conference last week, referring to the back-to-back storms. &amp;quot;There have been a series of extreme weather events... Anyone who says there is not a change in weather patterns is denying reality.&amp;quot; Cuomo seems to be on the same page as Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York, who cited climate change as a cause of Sandy&amp;#039;s devastation in his recent endorsement of President Obama. The announcement was timed with Bloomberg Businessweek&amp;#039;s cover story, &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s Global Warming, Stupid,&amp;quot; which accompanied a photo of a flooded Manhattan street.  Are they right? Unfortunately, it&amp;#039;s not really that simple.  Did Global Warming Cause Superstorm Sandy? The short answer is no. &amp;quot;The same type of storm could have happened 50 years ago,&amp;quot; says Jonathan Foley, director of the Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota. Although climate change has been linked to sea-level rise, heat waves, droughts, and rainfall intensity, the complexity of weather patterns makes it nearly impossible to say whether global warming caused any one isolated event. The weather is unpredictable, so climate scientists need to study long-term trends in order to sort out global warming&amp;#039;s impacts versus the standard messiness of the system.  Atmospheric scientist J. Marshall Shepherd of the University of Georgia likens global warming&amp;#039;s impacts on hurricanes to the use of steroids in baseball: Although doping can cause a player to hit more home runs, you can&amp;#039;t look at any one home run and say whether it was caused by steroid use.  The issue is even more complicated because the storm that slammed New York and New Jersey was no ordinary storm\u2014it was part hurricane, part winter storm, and part high-pressure area, with high tides from a full moon to top it off. The high-pressure area caused Sandy to do something very unusual: turn west toward land instead of heading out to sea. Such a combination of factors is very uncommon and not very well studied. It is too early to tell whether climate change has altered the chances of such a freak event.  Okay, But Did Global Warming Fan the Flames? Climate change most likely exacerbated Superstorm Sandy, Foley says. &amp;quot;Sandy was a massive firestorm event in the atmosphere. The thing that ignited it was not climate change, but climate change added more fuel to the fire.&amp;quot; Scientists seem to agree that the higher-than-normal seawater temperatures off the Northeast coast probably made Hurricane Sandy more intense. This year, ocean temperatures are about 5 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than usual for this time of year, Shepherd says. Climate change likely contributed to those higher temperatures, as did a particularly warm Gulf Stream infusion from the south.  The effect of the warmer water was to give the storm more energy as it moved up the coast. &amp;quot;Imagine the ocean is like a big pot of boiling water,&amp;quot; Foley explains. &amp;quot;The more heat you add, the more vigorously the water is going to stir and boil.&amp;quot; In addition, warmer air temperatures allowed the storm system to carry more water, which it subsequently dumped on land, contributing to flooding. Other factors were at play. As the hurricane rushed in, it pushed in front of it a wall of water, called a storm surge, which flooded some areas with up to 12-1/2 feet of water. &amp;quot;The biggest hazard was the storm surge,&amp;quot; Shepherd says. &amp;quot;It had to be exacerbated due to higher sea level from climate change.&amp;quot; Records show that the sea level in the Northeast has risen by up to 10 inches in the past 100 years. That extra water increases the height of the storm surge. &amp;quot;If the storm surge is normally 7 feet high, the 10-inch sea level rise brings the height of the surge up closer to 8 feet. That could mean the difference between flooding the subway system or not,&amp;quot; Shepherd says. (High tides also contributed in part to the storm surge&amp;#039;s intensity, but that was a coincidence of the full moon rather than anything climate-related.) Here&amp;#039;s the takeaway, according to Foley: &amp;quot;If the storm had developed in a climate that we used to have, it still would have been a terrible human tragedy of epic proportions. Climate change exacerbated a bad situation. But to say that climate change caused this big storm, that&amp;#039;s not scientifically justifiable right now.&amp;quot; Will Global Warming Turn the Northeast Into a Hurricane Corridor? Not likely. Climate change is not expected to alter where hurricanes form or their travel paths. Scientists don&amp;#039;t know yet how climate change will impact the number of hurricanes that we experience. Some studies have concluded that the number of storms will significantly increase, while others have found that hurricanes may actually decrease in number\u2014both Foley and Shepherd say this is a possibility. What we can say is that hurricanes seem to be increasing in intensity. Since the 1970s, scientists have observed a significant increase in the number of hurricanes that reach category 4 or 5 severity. As with Hurricane Sandy, that increase in intensity seems to be tightly correlated with the warmer temperatures and higher sea level associated with climate change. Climate change is projected to increase hurricane intensities by up to 11 percent by 2100. Meanwhile, precipitation from hurricanes is expected to increase by 20 percent. Changes in hurricane intensity are likely to be felt differently in different locations.  &amp;quot;We do not know whether superstorms like Sandy are harbingers of a &amp;#039;new normal&amp;#039; in the uneasy and unpredictable relationship between climate change and extreme weather events,&amp;quot; Shepherd wrote in a recent op-ed. For Foley, the possibility makes him uneasy. &amp;quot;What worries me is that we&amp;#039;re just beginning to enter a climate change era\u2014we&amp;#039;re really just getting started here. Storms like this may be just the canaries in the coal mine.&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/environment/a8268/what-sandy-says-and-doesnt-say-about-climate-change-14468194/>