As communities from the Carolinas to Maine brace for high storm surges, winds and downpours, there’s a growing climate discussion building around #Frankenstorm, which is the favored Twitter handle for the extraordinarily vast and potent nor’easter that is evolving as Hurricane Sandy, already a killer, collides with an Arctic cold front.
You can track specific developments in and around New York here and follow the details of the storm’s track and impacts via Jeff Masters, the Capital Weather Gang and Weather.gov.
But what is the role, if any, of greenhouse-drive global warming in this kind of rare system?
It’s easy to say, as some climatologists have, that “climate change is present in every single meteorological event.” As you’ll hear below, some climate scientists are telling me this event is precisely what you’d expect following a summer in which much of the Arctic Ocean was open water.
But there remains far too much natural variability in the frequency and potency of rare and powerful storms — on time scales from decades to centuries – to go beyond pointing to this event being consistent with what’s projected on a human-heated planet.
[*At the bottom of the post, I've appended an excerpt from a highly relevant 2002 Nature paper.] [*Adam Frank posted a great piece on the NPR blog on other factors complicating this question.]
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