Perhaps Sandy will be a turning point for the media.

In the wake of Superstorm Sandy, NBC political director Chuck Todd said bluntly during MSNBC’s “The Daily Rundown”:

Second year in a row the New York Metro area hit by this stuff. Let’s not bury our heads in the sand when it comes to — something has changed in the Atlantic. The climate has changed. It’s called climate change, folks.

Watch it:

I am scheduled to be on the PBS Newshour tonight on Sandy.

Satellite image of Superstorm Sandy taken at 10 am EDT Tuesday. Image NASA GSFC via Masters.

Climate science explains how global warming can make a superstorms like Sandy more destructive in several ways:

1. Warming-driven sea level rise makes storm surges more destructive. In fact, a recent study found “The sea level on a stretch of the US Atlantic coast that features the cities of New York, Norfolk and Boston is rising up to four times faster than the global average.”
2. “Owing to higher SSTs [sea surface temperatures] from human activities, the increased water vapor in the atmosphere leads to 5 to 10% more rainfall and increases the risk of flooding,” as Kevin Trenberth explained to me in a 2011 email about Hurricane Irene. He elaborates on that point for Sandy here and for all superstorms in this article.
3. “However, because water vapor and higher ocean temperatures help fuel the storm, it is likely to be more intense and bigger as well,” Trenberth added (see another of his articles here). Relatedly, warming also extends the range of warm SSTs, which can help sustain the strength of a hurricane as it steers on a northerly track into cooler water (much as apparently happened for Irene). September had the second highest global ocean temperatures on record and the Eastern seaboard was 5°F warmer than average (with global warming  responsible for about 1°F of that).
4. The unusual path of the storm — into the heavily populated east coast rather than out to see — was caused by a very strong blocking high pressure system that recent studies have linked to warming.  Meteorologist and former Hurricane Hunter Jeff Masters has an excellent analysis of this, “Why did Hurricane Sandy take such an unusual track into New Jersey?“

I have put these in order from most scientific certainty to least. The first two — the impact of sea level rise and increased water vapor — are unequivocal. The third is extremely likely. The fourth is more speculative.

Remember, climate scientists and others have for quite some time been warning New York City that climate change was dramatically increasing the odds of a devastating storm surge — see Greg Laden’s post, “Peer Reviewed Research Predicted NYC Subway Flooding by #Sandy.” See also today’s NY Times story, “For Years, Warnings That It Could Happen Here.” Also a brand new study of storm surges since 1923 finds “that Katrina-magnitude events have been twice as frequent in warm years compared with cold years” — so more severe surges are on the way.

And that’s the other key reason we must make the connection to climate change: Scientists worst-case scenarios are already happening — so their latest findings deserve attention so that Sandy doesn’t become just another Cassandra whose warnings are ignored. Now climate scientists project that we risk up to 10 times as much warming this century as in the last 50 years — with many devastating consequences from dramatic sea level rise to Dust-Bowlification (see my review of more than 60 recent studies).

That means the 4 factors described above are going to have a greater and greater impact over time. That’s one of the many, many reasons we must act to reduce emissions ASAP, so we don’t keep getting “new normals” that ultimately make Sandy and Irene seem tame.

The media coverage of the link between Sandy and climate change started (too) slowly, as Climate Progress reported, but has vastly improved. NBC News in particular had a great story with Trenberth that touched on the points above.

Unfortunately, while more of the media are getting the story right, some are still not.

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After his adoptive hometown of New York City was devastated by Hurricane Sandy, former president Bill Clinton railed against Mitt Romney for having mocked the idea of climate action. In a campaign stop in Minneapolis, MN, Clinton criticized Romney for having “ridiculed the president for his efforts to fight global warming in economically beneficial ways.” “In the real world,” Clinton concluded, “Barack Obama’s policies work better.”

Transcript:

I was actually listening closely to what the candidates said in these debates. In the first debate, the triumph of the moderate Mitt Romney. You remember what he did? He ridiculed the president. Ridiculed the president for his efforts to fight global warming in economically beneficial ways. He said, ‘Oh, you’re going to turn back the seas.’ In my part of America, we would like it if someone could’ve done that yesterday. All up and down the East Coast, there are mayors, many of them Republicans, who are being told, ‘You’ve got to move these houses back away from the ocean. You’ve got to lift them up. Climate change is going to raise the water levels on a permanent basis. If you want your town insured, you have to do this.’ In the real world, Barack Obama’s policies work better.

JR: Romney’s mockery of Obama was in his Republican National Convention speech, not the first debate. Sadly, climate never came up in any of the debates.

by Brad Johnson

Will the Frankenstorm be the moment that galvanizes Americans to recognize climate change as an urgent threat to our economic and national security?

Only if the leaders of the Democratic and Republican parties end their silence when climate disasters strike.

The silence of our leaders in both parties on global warming amid billion-dollar disasters is a key reason the American people are not better mobilized to address the threat. Even as communities across the nation work at the local level to build climate resilience, even as American voters connect the dots between the disasters they’ve faced and carbon pollution, Mitt Romney and Barack Obama have missed repeated opportunities to provide leadership over the course of the presidential campaign.

Below are the candidates’ responses to four different billion-dollar climate disasters during the campaign season:

August 2011: Hurricane Irene. Obama delivers a statement on Hurricane Irene at the White House and addresses victims in Paterson, NJ, but does not mention that the storm’s impact was intensified by oceanic warming, sea level rise, greater atmospheric vapor, and increased extreme precipitation in the Northeast connected to global warming.

Romney cancels fundraisers in Martha’s Vineyard, South Hampton, and East Hampton, two days after telling voters, “I can’t tell you how much of the warming I think we’re experiencing is caused by human beings. It may be a lot. It may be a little.”

June 2012: Colorado Wildfires. Obama announces an “all-hands-on-deck” response in his weekly address to the nation from Colorado Springs, after visiting the devastating wildfires, but does not mention the role climate change had in fueling the fires, including higher temperatures, more intense drought, and bark beetle infestations.

A week later, Romney visits the wildfires, and recommends that Americans help the victims by vacationing in Colorado. He does not mention climate change.

August 2012: National Drought. Obama announces an “all-hands-on-deck” response in his weekly address to the nation. He notes that “the month of July was the warmest month on record — warmer than any other month since we began keeping track more than a century ago,” but does not connect that to climate change.

Romney visits Iowa, says he’s “a little concerned about the drought,” and says “we’re looking for more rain.”

In October, Romney jokes about the Iowa drought: “It used to be that there was rainwater in Iowa, and people cared about it – we hope it’s coming back soon.”

September 2012: Hurricane Isaac. Mitt Romney tours damage in Louisiana with Gov. Bobby Jindal (R-LA), but does not mention climate change.

Obama tours the “enormous devastation” in Louisiana, but does not mention climate change.

Mitt Romney’s climate silence is carbon-fueled. His energy adviser is oil baron Harold Hamm, and his running mate is an anti-science conspiracy theorist, so there’s little chance Romney will connect the dots between this Frankenstorm and greenhouse pollution.

Furthermore, Romney believes that federal disaster relief efforts are “immoral” and should be privatized:

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