Let's Clear Up This Confusion About Sandy and Global Warming

Image: Steven Senne/AP

As New York City pumps water out of its subways and scrambles to restore power to lower Manhattan, the conversation about Sandy is shifting. Those is in the disaster zone are confronted with practical challenges. Brooklyn is out of gas. Manhattan looks like a Will Smith movie. New Jersey looks like a Michael Bay movie. Cleanup could cost as much as $50 billion. Over 6 million people in the Northeast remain without power. At least 48 people are dead. Meanwhile, a lot of people can’t get past the most basic of questions: How did this happen?

In its latest cover story, Bloomberg Businessweek is not shy about its answer, titling it “It’s Global Warming, Stupid.” Then there’s this cover:

Image via Bloomberg Businessweek

But the magazine’s Paul M. Barrett surprisingly spends little time on the actual science of the storm—and the science of climate change for that matter. He provides us with the broad strokes of how climate change spells big trouble for North America, who’s seen more of a fivefold increase in severe weather events in the past three decades, far more than any other part of the planet. When it comes time to get specific about Sandy, though, Barrett skirts around a direct explanation. This quote that he includes from Jonathan Foley, director of the Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota sort of sums up the point: “Would this kind of storm happen without climate change? Yes. It’s fueled by many factors. Is the storm stronger because of climate change? Yes.”

Here’s the thing. The vast majority of scientists would argue that our planet is experiencing a warming trend, as weather becomes more extreme. It’s seems perfectly reasonable to connect this widely held belief with a storm like Sandy. Global warming causes weather to become more extreme, and Sandy was pretty extreme. Therefore global warming caused Sandy. In fact, that’s a classic logical fallacy, the undistributed middle. (If all A are B and C is B, A does not necessarily equal C.) I’m not trying to say that climate change did not cause Sandy to become such a monster. Instead, I’m trying to make the simple point that it would be bad science to draw such a conclusion so soon after the disaster. Indeed, the good scientists say that there will be a lot of research into this particular storm and the role of climate change, but conclusions are a couple of years away.

Back to Bloomberg Businessweek and that bright red cover, though. From a scientific point of view, it would be a little bit stupid to say that Sandy is global warming’s fault, but that’s not what the magazine is inevitably doing. The main thrust of Barrett’s argument is actually about the role of climate change in the current political conversation. More specifically, it’s about the absence of climate change in the current political conversation. The issue wasn’t brought up once in the three presidential debates, but regardless of whether you think the notion of global warming is up for debate, you can’t deny the spike in extreme weather. Call it climate change if you want, or global warming or just a really long streak of bad luck, but it’s time we deal with this situation. “If Hurricane Sandy does nothing else, it should suggest that we need to commit more to disaster preparation and response,” writes Barrett.

But seriously—and this is where the bold cover makes the most sense—how long is it going to take before we can all agree that something is causing these horrible disasters to be bigger and more frequent? We can wait two years for the papers to come out of MIT, or we could elect some leaders that will actually address both the causes and the effects of climate change at a policy level. Getting more hybrid cars on the road isn’t going to have a massive impact overnight, and it might not stop a superstorm from slamming into the East Coast next year. These storms are going to keep getting worse if we don’t do something, though.

Both Barack Obama and Mitt Romney have backpedaled on the issue in recent months, apparently for political reasons, and that’s just ridiculous. Enjoy this paragraph from Barrett’s cover story, which is worth reading in full:

Mitt Romney has gone from being a supporter years ago of clean energy and emission caps to, more recently, a climate agnostic. On Aug. 30, he belittled his opponent’s vow to arrest climate change, made during the 2008 presidential campaign. “President Obama promised to begin to slow the rise of the oceans and heal the planet,” Romney told the Republican National Convention in storm-tossed Tampa. “My promise is to help you and your family.” Two months later, in the wake of Sandy, submerged families in New Jersey and New York urgently needed some help dealing with that rising-ocean stuff.

We won’t know how much of an effect climate change had on Sandy for some time to come, but we do know that climate change has made extreme weather our new normal. Rather than squabbling and kowtowing to people with their heads in the sand, it’s high time we started addressing the issue.