I am starting this thread to collect the gradual evidence released proving what most of us already know: Hurricane Sandy is just a taste of things to come.
I was particularly irked by this:
Hurricane Sandy had little, if anything, to do with climate change. It was a rare weather event that could have occurred with or without climate change. It's possible that climate change has slightly increased the probability of such an event. It's also possible it has decreased the probability. Far worse hurricanes have hit Long Islands before climate change. Such as the Long Islands express in 1938.
That's some really bad logic from AndrewP, and a false argument I hear quite often.
Our climate has already changed, and its rate of change is accelerating. Thats a fact.
So really, there is not a single weather event today that u can clearly say is not effected by climate change.
Saying a weather phenomena is affected by climate change is not the same thing as saying it has been caused by it in the sense that it was made more likely. If a tree falls on my house it was probably affected by a fat man in Japan blowing his nose. But I would never say the fat man caused the tree to fall on my house. The relevant and interesting question from a practical question is did climate change make a Sandy-like event more likely?
The Climate HAS changed. Its changed enough that even recent public polls show that people experience it enough to accept it as a part of their reality already.
Also, Sandy has been addressed multiple times, and established that its damage was definitely a product of climate change:
RSL rise will raise the base level for flood heights in New York City and exacerbate flooding caused by future hurricanes

Sea level rise did indeed exacerbate flooding associated with Sandy. However, damage would only have been slightly less without this sea level rise for a number of reasons:
1. Sea level has only risen 17" or so in NYC over the last 150 years. The difference between 12' and 10'7" is significant but not huge.
2. Of those 13", only ~10" is associated with AGW. 4" are due to glacial rebound from the Laurentide ice sheet. Another 3-4" is associated with natural warming coming out of the little ice age. This is demonstrated by the large amount of sea level rise from 1850-1910 and also the fact that the IPCC blames a significant amount of warming after 1910 due to high solar activity and low volcanic activity relative to the prior period.
3. Much of the infrastructure damaged was built long after much of the sea level rise had already taken place. In other words, damage was not caused by rising seas encroaching upon existing infrastructure, but by new infrastructure being built too close to sea level. If half of the infrastructure damaged was built after 1950, in full knowledge of, and in despite of, the first 6" of sea level rise, then damage was only exacerbated by the remaining 7" of encroachment (of which only 5" was due to AGW). For infrastructure built today, none of the damage can be blamed on SLR encroachment. For infrastructure built 100 years ago, maybe 10" can be blamed on SLR encroachment (of which 8" is associated with AGW)
4. Combining points 1-3, only ~5" of the 12' of surge can be blamed on AGW-associated SLR occurring after infrastructure was built. I doubt that 5" out of 12' made an exceptionally large difference in damage.
This is without even discussing all other countless possible influences on how storms are shaped now, in our new evolving climate. To imply that expected climate-change induced weather changes are somehow an outrageous suggestion is only an embarrassing show of your true agenda.
I never said that climate-change induced weather changes are an outrageous suggestion.
How about the fact that near-Sandy level flooding (7-8 ft) will have an 11-17% chance of occurring every year by the 2020s.
Climate Risk Information 2013
http://nyc.gov/html/planyc2030/downloads/pdf/npcc_climate_risk_information_2013_report.pdf (Page 21)
1. It says 7' not 7-8'.
2. A 7' tide is no where near the 12' tide of Sandy. Gloria produced a total tide of 7' at Battery Park but total damage was only $900 million much of which was not in NY and/or not associated with the surge (rather with the wind gusts and flooding rains). There was probably only a couple hundred million in surge damage with Gloria, which would be perhaps 500 million today.
3. A 7' tide was already a 10% probability per year 1971-2000. An increase to 11-17% (mean 13-13.5%) is not a huge increase.
4. They rely upon a prediction of 4-8" in SLR from 2000-2004 to the 2020s. Slanger 2012 predicts .6m of SLR from 1980-1999 to the 2090s (105 years) or a linear extrapolated rate of 5.7mm/yr. Over the 23 years from 2000-2004 to the 2020s, this would be 4.7". Of this only 3.5" would be associated with AGW (the other 1.2" would be glacial rebound). Presumably the trend is not linear however, and more of the sea level rise would be weighted towards the late 21st century. Thus inference from Slanger suggests only 2-3" of AGW-associated SLR by the 2020s, not 4-8".
http://www.staff.science.uu.nl/~slang101/docs/thesis_slangen_final.pdfLinear extrapolation of the current trend of 2.77mm/yr yields only 2.5" over the 23 year period, of which only 2" would be AGW.
http://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/trends/8518750.pngOne possible reason for their high estimate is that they rely upon an average scenarios RCP4.5 and RCP8.5, which are on the high end of the emissions scenarios (and reality which will probably be close to RCP4.5). Their reliance upon higher emissions scenarios skews
all of their estimates for
all climate variables higher.
Also just recently:
Mayor Bloomberg Outlines Ambitious Proposal To Protect City Against The Effects of Climate Change To Build A Stronger, More Resiliant New York
http://www.nyc.gov/html/om/html/2013a/pr201-13.html
So... I beleive the debate of how much worse climate change has made Sandy is an interesting one. But the suggestion that this is business-as-usual, or that climate change is unrelated, is offensive to all those who lost property or loved ones in my hometown of NYC.
I'm fine with this thread, but leave polarizing provocations out of it, please.
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What I found most interesting about Sandy, was that 90° turn to the left it suddenly took. This was said to be caused by a blocking ridge to the North. If I remember correctly that ridge also fueled Sandy to become a hybrid storm.
If the 2012 melting season - with a semi-permanent high over Greenland and Baffin Bay - had an effect on this blocking ridge (and chances are high that Arctic sea ice loss has something to do with AGW) , then it could be a product of climate change, or at least be influenced by it.
I don't find this far-fetched, but I can't prove anything. But you know, absence of evidence, etc.
We'll have to wait and see if we get more storms with peculiar, unique features, in the coming two decades.
It is possible that AGW and arctic sea ice loss will cause more blocking. However, the book on this is hardly closed. The 2007 IPCC report suggested that blocking would decrease in a warming world. However, after the string of blocky years recently, newer studies have suggested this may be associated with AGW and sea ice loss. Now 2013 is shaping up to not have much blocking despite the low sea ice. We will see.
However, even if that block was made somewhat more likely by AGW (remember we're talking probability here - such blocks have occurred in the past without AGW), Sandy would still have ended up hitting CT or RI, possibly inundating Providence Harbor as the Hurricane of 1938 did. Or it may have screamed off to the northeast wreaking havoc in Newfoundland.
Track is an irrelevant question in my opinion. It's an interesting oddity of Sandy which may or may not have been made slightly more likely by AGW. More important is whether hurricanes will become more or less likely with AGW. Existing studies suggest they will become slightly less common, but with slightly higher average intensity. Studies to date find no trend, or even declining trends in normalized cyclone damage.