It should come as no surprise that as Hurricane Sandy spiraled up the eastern seaboard, a variety of media outlets sought to explain the so-called super storm’s relationship to climate change. A few did well, but generalizations about extreme weather continue to mar this type of coverage.
Take Rebecca Leber’s attempt to bash the press for ignoring climate change at Climate Progress. “Despite the hysteria surrounding Hurricane Sandy,” she wrote, “not one major newspaper has reported the scientifically established link that carbon pollution fuels more extreme weather.”
That assertion about an established link is misleading. In reality, climate change fuels some extreme weather in some places, and the links are not very well understood. As Gavin Schmidt, a climate modeler and NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, put it in a blog post for RealClimate.org last year:
Not all extremes are the same. Discussions of ‘changes in extremes’ in general without specifying exactly what is being discussed are meaningless. A tornado is an extreme event, but one whose causes, sensitivity to change and impacts have nothing to do with those related to an ice storm, or a heat wave or cold air outbreak or a drought.
There is no theory or result that indicates that climate change increases extremes in general. This is a corollary of the previous statement - each kind of extreme needs to be looked at specifically - and often regionally as well.
Even some of the best reporters continue to generalize extremes, despite these crystal-clear warnings that they shouldn’t. In a post for The New Yorker, for instance, Elizabeth Kolbert wrote:
As with any particular “weather-related loss event,” it’s impossible to attribute Sandy to climate change. However, it is possible to say that the storm fits the general pattern in North America, and indeed around the world, toward more extreme weather, a pattern that, increasingly, can be attributed to climate change.
Kolbert not only misleads readers to believe that climate change increases all extremes everywhere, but after asserting that Hurricane Sandy “fits” this “general pattern,” she cites a recent paper about heat waves to support her claim. It’s a classic bait-and-switch and totally irresponsible since the dynamics of heat waves are very different from those of hurricanes.
Adam Frank did much better in a post for NPR where he eschewed the temptation to generalize about extremes and placed tropical cyclones in their proper context.
“There is a hierarchy of weather events which scientists feel they understand well enough for establishing climate change links,” he wrote. “Global temperature rises and extreme heat rank high on that list, but hurricanes rank low.”
CNN apparently
Climate change also plays a part, but it’s a complicated role indeed (see Andrew Revkin’s post at The New York Times for details). In a widely quoted paper published in March, Kevin Trenberth, a scientist in the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research wrote:
The answer to the oft-asked question of whether an event is caused by climate change is that it is the wrong question. All weather events are affected by climate change because the environment in which they occur is warmer and moister than it used to be.
Saying that climate change affects all weather is different than saying that climate change increases extremes in general, though. As Trenberth put it, “It is when natural variability and climate change develop in the same direction that records get broken.” With Hurricane Sandy, he wrote in a guest post for Climate Progress, climate change “contributed” (on the order of 5 to 10 percent) to unusually high ocean temperatures in the Atlantic, which meant more moisture in the atmosphere and thus more rainfall. In other words, natural variability provided the “optimal conditions” for a huge storm, which were “enhanced by global warming.”
I'm sorry, but come on.
We can't say climate change isn't tied to the drought and weather chaos we've been witnessing lately?
That's bull. That's the language which benefited the cigarette companies as their products were killing people. "We can't say 100% that cigarettes cause every case of cancer and emphysema, but we've observed a correlation between smokers and lung diseases. Therefore we can't say smoking is bad for everyone."
Come on. We know what the signs of a carbon induced changed climate are. We know the evidence of our eyes. It's time to stop hedging.
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2012/10/30/did-climate-change-cause-hurricane-sandy/
"The hedge expressed by journalists is that many variables go into creating a big storm, so the size of Hurricane Sandy, or any specific storm, cannot be attributed to climate change. That’s true, and it’s based on good science. However, that statement does not mean that we cannot say that climate change is making storms bigger. It is doing just that—a statement also based on good science, and one that the insurance industry is embracing, by the way. (Huh? More on that in a moment.)"
Carbon is making our climate more unstable. Climate may or may not be causing storms, but it is making them more frequent and more severe.
Let's stop trying to obscure the links between events we are predicting should happen based on the science and the events that we are observing as we speak. All that does is mute the ability of disaster to incite public reaction.
Climate change is here. It's bad for everyone. Are we going to do something about it or just twiddle our thumbs while our coasts flood and our interior dries in the sun?
#1 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Tue 30 Oct 2012 at 11:12 PM
"one that the insurance industry is embracing, by the way. (Huh? More on that in a moment)"
For those who want a disturbing Ayn Randie read of who's going to profit from global catastrophe, you could look at Ryan's old hedge fund farm article
http://www.cjr.org/the_audit/audit_notes_farmland_booms_reg.php#comments
or you could read this piece I stumbled on:
http://news.haverford.edu/blogs/ourschool/files/2010/06/Capitalists-of-Chaos-Mckenzie-Funk.pdf
"The savviest corporate buyers see global warming as a double boon: In the short term, it’s a push factor, destroying agricul- ture in regions such as northern China and the American Southwest, which are be- coming too dry to support crops, and causing food prices to spike. In the long term, it creates a pull: Higher-latitude countries like Ukraine, Russia, Romania, Kazakh- stan and Canada are becoming more productive, not less, as the climate heats up. “You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to suggest that production belts in the North- ern Hemisphere are shifting northwards,” says Carl Atkin, the head of agribusiness research at Bidwells, the British real es- tate behemoth. The firm’s consulting wing is helping financial clients make a major push into Eastern Europe...
As climate change pushes farm-
ing to higher latitudes, the money
has followed. Two of the most visi-
ble farmland investors – British-run Landkom and Swedish-run Black Earth – have funneled hundreds of mil- lions of dollars into agricultural operations in Ukraine and Russia. BlackRock has in- vested $250 million in British farmland, Pergam Finance has sunk $70 million into former ranches in Uruguay and Argentina, and Agcapita has put $18 million into Can- ada’s future corn belt. After Saskatchewan land prices jumped 15 percent in 2008 – the largest increase on record – Agcapita began raising its next $20 million.
One of the most aggressive climate in- vestors is Jim Slater, the co-founder of British-run Agrifirma, who came to fame writing an investment column for the Sunday Telegraph that he signed “The Capitalist.” In one previous venture, Slat- er made annual profits of 66 percent on uranium and molybdenum in Greenland, where retreating glaciers have extend- ed the range of mining operations. Now, in Brazil, Slater has spent $20 million to buy or option 170,000 acres and survey another 6 million."
It's disturbing to see people investing in the "in the effects, not the causes" which they've decided not to believe.
#2 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Wed 31 Oct 2012 at 03:30 PM
Bill McKibben:
http://www.democracynow.org/2012/10/29/bill_mckibben_on_hurricane_sandy_and
"[I]t’s also really important that everybody, even those who aren’t in the kind of path of this storm, reflect about what it means that in the warmest year in U.S. history, when we’ve seen the warmest month, July, of any month in a year in U.S. history, in a year when we saw, essentially, summer sea ice in the Arctic just vanish before our eyes, what it means that we’re now seeing storms of this unprecedented magnitude. If there was ever a wake-up call, this is it."
Jeff Masters:
http://www.democracynow.org/2012/10/29/frankenstorm_meteorologist_warns_hurricane_sandy_an
"Climate change has become the new Voldemort of our times, that which cannot be named. And it’s ridiculous that we can’t talk about a subject that’s directly influencing our lives now and will continue to do so even more strongly in the future. I see superstorm Sandy here as kind of a wake-up call coming the week before the election. "Hey, America, hey, politicians, pay attention to this.""
Curtis Brainard:
"[G]eneralizing about extreme weather helps no one"
Man, those right wing digs that JLD threw at you, about you being an advocate and not a journalist, must have really stung.
This article really rewarded that behavior. You showed him.
#3 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Thu 1 Nov 2012 at 01:55 AM
http://www.climatecentral.org/news/how-global-warming-made-hurricane-sandy-worse-15190
"There are three different ways climate change might have influenced Sandy: through the effects of sea level rise; through abnormally warm sea surface temperatures; and possibly through an unusual weather pattern that some scientists think bore the fingerprint of rapidly disappearing Arctic sea ice.
If this were a criminal case, detectives would be treating global warming as a likely accomplice in the crime."
http://www.insurancejournal.com/news/west/2012/10/31/268665.htm
"[T]his year not only was the water in the Atlantic warmer than normal, but the warm water arrived about six weeks early, yielding coastal temperatures in May that were more like they are round July, she said.
Sandy drew its energy from that warm water, and the East Coast can expect more severe weather in this winter and the next several seasons over the next 20 years as a long weather cycle plays itself out"
(Get this, Evelyn Browning-Garriss doesn't even buy the whole greenhouse gas is causing climate change argument (the ol' 'believe in the effects, not the causes' two step), but even she was looking at enough data to conclude climate change intensified this storm)
#4 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Thu 1 Nov 2012 at 02:07 AM
Kevin Trenberth updated:
http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/33084/title/Opinion--Super-Storm-Sandy/
"As Mark Twain said in the late 19th century, “Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.” Now humans are changing the weather, and nobody does anything about it! As we have seen this year, whether from drought, heat waves and wild fires, or super storms, there is a cost to not taking action to slow climate change, and we are experiencing this now."
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2012/10/30/a-wind-is-rising/
"Basically, it’s hard to know the precise role of global warming in the formation, movement, power, and damage caused by Sandy, but what we do know is that the Atlantic had warmer temperatures for longer than usual – conditions consistent with global warming – and that is a source of both energy and water for the hurricane. There is some thought that the huge arctic sea ice melt this year may have contributed to the abrupt westward turn of the hurricane into the coast. Correlation isn’t necessarily causation; the details are difficult to calculate and we may never know.
But we do know that something looking very much like this has been predicted by climate scientists. This may be an unusual event – after all, the nor’easter timing was important, and the spring tides from the full Moon contributed as well – but it’s hard to say just how unusual it will be in the future. Warmer waters lead to an extended hurricane season which can stretch into the time when nor’easters are more likely to occur. These circumstances loaded the dice. And as Mims so aptly phrased it, the reality of global warming means "climate change, by definition, is present in every single weather event on the planet."
[A] hurricane a thousand miles across doing tens of billions of dollars of damage and causing untold chaos is more than a wake up call.
It should be a shot of adrenaline into the heart."
It should be, but it won't because according to some people: "[G]eneralizing about extreme weather helps no one"
This is a clear case where climate change has played a role, likely a large role, in a major disaster within a major city.
Minimizing that role, instead of recognizing it and asking your audience to recognize it with you, helps no one. If climate change represents a existential threat which will disrupt our access to food, water, and protection from the elements, then we must point it out authoritatively when it affects us like it has done lately.
We really don't have the time to f*ck around anymore.
#5 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Thu 1 Nov 2012 at 02:52 AM
The majority of tropical storm scientists see liitle global warming attribution in hurricane Sandy and it is only the usual far left suspects like Masters or the EDF shill Openheimer that ignore data like this.
http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/2012/11/normalized-us-hurricane-damage-1900.html
#6 Posted by Windy , CJR on Thu 1 Nov 2012 at 09:13 PM
The up side to Sandy that no journalists are addressing is that many East Coast folks are getting a taste of the eco-Taliban utopian world where there is no gas and no electricity and dwindling food sources.
#7 Posted by Windy , CJR on Thu 1 Nov 2012 at 09:24 PM
Curtis Brainard is brain dead. His strangely asserts that it's misleading even to state the obvious fact that Hurricane Sandy fits the altered weather pattern predicted by climate change. Huh? Even when journalists bend over backward to avoid saying that this hurricane is related to climate change; it just fits the pattern - that's not good enough for him. Brainard is some kind of ideologue and his argument is dopey on its face.
#8 Posted by Joe Adams, CJR on Fri 2 Nov 2012 at 07:25 PM
I believe that assertion about an established link is misleading as well.
The world is changing as we know it. It has been changing for billions of years.
I think these type of writings are important and necessary.
It is not important that we all agree on a topic. It is important that this type of journalism continues to press on with the thoughts of all intelligent thinking men and women. I have stated on other posts that I find refreshing this particular journal and
through healthy well thought out disagreements much can be learned. I have had opinions about certain things in the past and read something intelligent that was counter to my thinking, that caused me to change my thinking. You guys please keep doing what you are doing!
#9 Posted by Todd Krejci, CJR on Sun 16 Dec 2012 at 12:47 AM