La-Niña? I Sneezed And Missed It!

Scientific American (4.00 / 2)

has a lot of Sandy coverage & climate stats up.  Not sure if it's subscriber-only, but here's the link to one article:  Did climate change cause Hurricane Sandy?

Recent research by Charles Greene at Cornell University and other climate scientists has shown that as more Arctic sea ice melts in the summer—because of global warming—the NAO is more likely  to be negative during the autumn and winter. A negative NAO makes the Jet Stream more likely to move in a big, wavy pattern across the U.S., Canada and the Atlantic, causing the kind of big southward dip that occurred during Sandy.

Climate change amps up other basic factors that contribute to big storms. For example, the oceans have warmed, providing more energy for storms. And the Earth’s atmosphere has warmed, so it retains more moisture, which is drawn into storms and is then dumped on us.

These changes contribute to all sorts of extreme weather. In a recent op-ed in the Washington Post, James Hansen at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York blamed climate change for excessive drought, based on six decades of measurements, not computer models: “Our analysis shows that it is no longer enough to say that global warming will increase the likelihood of extreme weather and to repeat the caveat that no individual weather event can be directly linked to climate change. To the contrary, our analysis shows that, for the extreme hot weather of the recent past, there is virtually no explanation other than climate change.”

 

 

"The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness."  - John Kenneth Galbraith

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by: countrycat @ Sat Nov 03, 2012 at 14:22:43 PM UTC

The proof the sceptics want: (4.00 / 1)

 Nice find. Adding to the report from Cornell, it is very possible that with a cooler Atlantic Ocean, the tropical wave which spawned Sandy may have never manifested in the first place.

 But the climate change skeptics (the oil puppets), will drag this through the mud until play-by-play, minute-by-minute coverage of tropical systems can be provided.

...And we're now witnessing the first stages of a tropical wave. It is definitely being energized by climate change. And WAIT!... Hold everything! Traces of some sort of aerosol have been detected. It appears the system will NOT be influenced by climate change for the next twenty minutes. The crowd is going wild!

October 2012 was the 332nd consecutive month with a global temperature above the 20th century average. The last month with below-average temperature was February 1985. - N.O.A.A.

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by: Dragontide @ Sat Nov 03, 2012 at 18:25:12 PM UTC

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