Jeff Masters talking:
We just witnessed the worst hurricane in New York City history. There was a hurricane back in 1821 that made a direct hit on the city and brought the storm surge up a couple feet below what Sandy did. So, New York City has never seen this sort of a hurricane strike. We saw water nine feet above normal tide levels in the Battery on the south side of New York City. And the combination of the storm tide, which is the—the tide plus the storm surge, did reach about 14 feet. And unfortunately, the storm hit at about 8:00 p.m., which was about the time of high tide, so that surge rode on top of the tide and inundated much of the southern portion of Manhattan.
And we shouldn’t forget about what happened in the neighboring areas, as well. There has been over eight or nine feet of water along all of the New Jersey—northern New Jersey Shore, Raritan Bay, a lot of Long Island Sound. Portions of Connecticut had storm surges of eight or nine feet. And this is going to be an extremely devastating disaster, not quite on the scale of Katrina, fortunately, because we don’t have levees with people living below sea level behind them, but this storm is going to leave its mark in American history as one of the greatest disasters in history of our country.
We’re having problems with river flooding in a number of areas. The New Jersey location is of the greatest concern right now with the levee breach. The Cuyahoga River in Cleveland reached its highest flood level on record this morning because of heavy rains in Ohio. So we’re experiencing flooding in Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York. Hudson River has also gone over major flood stage. So this storm dropped a lot of rain, and I think we’re going to see close to a billion dollars in river flooding, which isn’t anywhere near the level we saw last year with Hurricane Irene, but it’s still significant. Wind damage is also a huge concern. We’ve got about seven million customers without power, the last I saw. The U.S. record for most customers without power is 10 million, set during the superstorm of 1993. So, Sandy really does earn the moniker “superstorm.” It’s got effects over a huge area of the U.S., and not just the coast where it came ashore.
Let’s talk about two words that we don’t see with “Hurricane Sandy,” with “extreme weather,” with “severe weather” flashing on all the TV screens: “climate change.”
I think this storm hitting the week before the election should really serve as a huge wake-up call for our politicians and to people of America. We’ve had a remarkable number of freak weather occurrences in the past two years that are unprecedented in meteorologic history in the U.S. Any one of these, you could say, “Well, maybe that’s natural variability.” But when you start thinking about what’s happened over the past two years, you really need to say, “Hey, what’s going on?”
OK, we’ve got Superstorm Sandy this year. We also had summer in March, where we had temperatures in the eighties for 10 straight days in areas of the Upper Midwest, unprecedented sort of warmth in the springtime. This year is by far the warmest year in U.S. history. And we saw the second- and third-warmest summers in U.S. history, back to back, the last two years. We basically didn’t have a winter this past year. Last year, we had record floods on the three largest rivers east of the Rockies—the Mississippi, the Missouri and the Ohio. And all of this has come in the presence of a steadily warming global temperature.
And it’s really not that hard to understand that if you add a lot of heat-trapping gas into the atmosphere, you’re bound to cause major changes in weather patterns. You’re bound to see unprecedented sort of weather events. And I think it’s a guarantee that some of the weather events we’ve seen over the past two years in the U.S. have to have the imprint of climate change on them. You wouldn’t have had this sort of crazy weather without it.
In the last week, Sandy has been mentioned in at least 94 stories in major newspapers. Yet a Nexis search found that zero of these stories mentioned ‘climate change,’ ‘global warming,’ or even ‘extreme weather.’
it’s uncomfortable to get the sort of blowback that you get when you do talk about this issue. I mean, scientists don’t tend to be great communicators. That’s not why they went into the field. They went into it because they have a fascination with the natural world that they wanted to explore. And they tend to not want to get in front of people and be involved in sort of contentious discussions about something that’s going on. But we have to understand that whenever an industry finds its profits threatened by something they produce, they’re going to mount a large PR campaign to protect those profits. So it’s no wonder that the oil companies, which are the richest and most profitable businesses in world history, if they find their profits threatened, they’re going to go after anyone who may speak out about the science of what’s going on. So, it’s a very uncomfortable situation to be in where you’re being attacked by so many different places that the oil companies are able to incite to do this sort of thing, so I think it’s not a surprise at all that we’re seeing this sort of reluctance to talk about things.
We saw that happen when the ozone hole opened up over Antarctica. All of a sudden, the world sat up and took notice and said, “Oh, this is probably pretty bad. We might be threatening life on earth here.” And some actions were taken, very strong actions, to rectify the situation, and they’ve been quite successful.
The problem is a little bit wider-scale now. Instead of one industry, the CFC industry, being affected, now you’re talking about the oil and gas industry, and it’s not just a few products that are affected, we’re talking about the entire basis of industrialized economy. I mean, fossil fuels are huge. So it’s a much bigger problem. But with these sorts of storms, I mean, people are going to wise up at some point and say, “Hey, what’s going on? Hey, maybe we shouldn’t mess with the very forces that enable us to live on the planet earth.” I mean, we’ve got to get self-preservation in our minds pretty soon, or this is just the start of things, too. I mean, here we are in the year 2012; what’s going to be happening in 2030 if we’re already seeing storms like this, summers like this, ridiculous flooding like we saw last year?
– source democracynow.org
Jeff Masters, director of meteorology at the Weather Underground