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Australia’s Climate Commission says superstorm Sandy was made worse by climate change.
The death toll in the United States has passed 90 in 10 states, bringing to more than 150 the number killed by Sandy since it swept across the Caribbean, including Haiti and Cuba.
“The evidence suggests that climate change exacerbated the severity of Hurricane Sandy,” the chairman of the Climate Commission’s science advisory panel, Professor Matthew England, said in a new report.
“The shifts in climate towards higher temperatures and more moisture in the air are becoming the new normal, which is influencing the nature and intensity of weather patterns around the world.”
Prof England said storm surges had a particularly devastating impact on areas of the US coast and a warmer world, with higher sea levels, would make such surges worse.
Before reaching land, Sandy was feeding off exceptionally warm surface waters in the Atlantic Ocean.
The temperature of the surface waters from which Sandy was drawing energy was three to five degrees warmer than average, the commission reported.
Also, the base sea level had risen by about 20cm over the past century.
“A rise of 20cm may seem modest, but even small rises like this lead to a large increase in the probability of damaging floods,” the commission reported.
“The primary reason for rising sea levels around the world is climate change, which warms and thus expands the oceans and adds more water to the ocean by melting glaciers and ice caps.”
The commission brings together internationally renowned climate scientists with policy and business leaders.
After the storm: the remains of burnt homes in the Breezy Point neighborhood of Queens, New York City. Photograph: Mario Tama/Getty Images
The images of a paralysed New York City at the mercy of Hurricane Sandy‘s wall of water have forced climate change on to the political agenda in the final week of the 2012 presidential election campaign. Even before Sandy made landfall political commentators were debating whether the storm would be better for Mitt Romney or Barack Obama. In any event it has brought forth statements from prominent Democrats and elected officials on climate change and spurred public debate about the neglected topic.
Campaigners said the devastating storm could turn out to be the October Surprise of the elections, exposing Republicans‘ failure to engage with an issue that is no longer a distant threat, but a present day danger.
Bill Clinton, campaigning for Barack Obama in Minnesota, attacked Romney for using climate change as a laugh line in his convention speech. “He 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,’” Clinton told a rally. “In my part of America, we would like it if someone could’ve done that yesterday.”
He went on to argue the local leaders from both parties were already ahead of Romney and Republicans in Congress in engaging with the issue. Michael Bloomberg, a Republican, and Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, have both cited Sandy as evidence of climate change.
“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,’” Clinton said.
Al Gore in a statement on his website sounded a similar theme, calling for Sandy to serve as a brutal wakeup call to the realities of climate change, much as floods in Nashville hit home for him in 2010.
“For many, Hurricane Sandy may prove to be a similar event: a time when the climate crisis – which is often sequestered to the far reaches of our everyday awareness became a reality,” Gore wrote.
“Hurricane Sandy is a disturbing sign of things to come. We must heed this warning and act quickly to solve the climate crisis. Dirty energy makes dirty weather.”
The Republican contender had tried to cast Obama’s promise for action on global warming as a sign of grandiosity.
Romney and Obama have avoided mentioning climate change on the campaign trail and the topic did not get a single mention in the televised presidential debates – for the first time since 1988.The absence has frustrated campaigners who say this year’s heat waves, drought, wildfires – and now Sandy – provide ample evidence of climate change and of the urgency for action.
“Climate change used to be a science of projection. Now it is a science of attribution,” said Angela Anderson, climate and energy director for the Union of Concerned Scientists. She also argued the public was ahead of political leaders in engaging with the topic.
“People are beginning to connect extreme weather events to climate change more and more at the same moment that there is this deafening silence, so that is incredibly disappointing.”
Multiple studies have linked the warming of the atmosphere and the oceans to stronger Atlantic storms – though scientists balk at attributing a single severe storm such as Sandy to climate change.
“The terrifying truth is that America faces a future full of Frankenstorms,” said Shaye Wolf, the climate science director for the Centre for Biological Diversity. “Climate change raises sea levels and super-sizes storms. The threat of killer winds and crushing storm surges will grow by the year unless we get serious about tackling greenhouse gas pollution.”
Warmer ocean temperatures add more energy to storms. Warmer air holds more moisture, which means more rainfall. Sandy dumped more than 11 inches of rain in some parts of New Jersey, according to Nasa.
In addition, there is growing evidence that Americans are increasingly vulnerable to such severe events.
Sea-level rise, due to climate change, makes for more extreme storm surges. And sea-level rise in the north-eastern US is occurring three or four times faster than the global average, putting more Americans in harm’s way. About 100 million Americans live in coastal areas within 3ft of mean sea level in cities such as Boston and Miami as well as New York.
As Mike Tidwell, the founder of Chesapeake Climate Action, wrote this week: “We are all from New Orleans now. Climate change – through the measurable rise of sea levels and a documented increase in the intensity of Atlantic storms – has made 100 million Americans virtually as vulnerable to catastrophe as the victims of Hurricane Katrina were seven years ago.”
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NASA’s Aqua satellite captured a visible image Sandy’s massive circulation. Sandy covers 1.8 million square miles, from the Mid-Atlantic to the Ohio Valley, into Canada and New England.
In addition to the immediate physical impacts Hurricane Sandy promises the Northeast, economists say the storm also will bring intrinsic financial effects that are sure to unfold over the next few days and linger through the coming months.
Instead of an early snowfall this time of year, farmers along the eastern seaboard are dealing with flood waters and wind damage from Superstorm Sandy, which is expected to affect everything from poultry production to grocery prices.
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The president pulled an all-nighter. But as the northeast corner of the US shook itself out of a hurricane-induced daze today, there was a sense that Sandy’s catastrophic winds might have wrought much more damage – but that the billions worth it did in eight states was quite enough, thank-you.
The most important message I have for them is that America is with you.
Barack Obama
The eye of the storm was elsewhere – heading for Canada. But the focus of emergency relief attention was the Manhattan pressure-cooker, where traffic bridges that lash the island to the rest of the US were re-opening, but slowly; and all local mass transit and New York city’s three airports remained closed.
Residents stand over vehicles which were submerged in Lower Manhattan. Photo: Reuters
Not since the blackouts of 2003 – almost a decade back – were the sheath-like towers of the city’s iconic skyline etched in such deep black, as opposed to their customary high-wattage glitter.
“We expected an unprecedented storm impact in New York City,” mayor Michael Bloomberg said. “That’s what we got.”
Amidst torrential rain and as much as 50cm of snow in high-country blizzards, the dawn tally was gob-smacking in a storm path sweeping from the New Jersey coast and up through New York state and central Pennsylvania.
A resident looks over the remains of burned homes in the Rockaways section of New York. Photo: Reuters
There were almost 40 storm related deaths – 18 of them in New York, including two boys hit by a falling tree in suburban Westchester.
Elsewhere, the dead included a 90-year-old woman and a firefighter killed in separate incidents in Connecticut; two adults dead in storm-related traffic accidents in Maryland; and a 40-year-old woman killed while driving in storm-induced snow in West Virginia.
Now 8.5 million homes in 16 states and the District of Columbia are without power – including 250,000 in the southern half of Manhattan, where a series of spectacular explosions at an electrical facility doused the lights; and in the entire cities of Newark and Jersey City.
The coastline of New Jersey in the aftermath of Sandy. Photo: Reuters
A spokesman for Con Edison says the challenge to restore power in the city that never sleeps is “unprecedented in scope.” Initial predictions that power would be back in 2-3 days quickly stretched to 3-4 days … and then to ‘maybe’ 4-5 days.
There was general cause for anxiety, with flood-warnings still in place for low-lying coastal areas that are home to hundreds of thousands. But perhaps the greatest worry, if only until there has been sufficient public communication to shut it down as an issue, is the safety of the country’s oldest nuclear power plant – on the New Jersey coast, at Oyster Creek, 95km east of Philadelphia.
An abnormal storm surge of almost 2m reportedly pushed water levels at the plant, ‘potentially’ impacting a “water intake structure” that circulates cooling water through the plant’s repository of spent fuel rods, according to a spokesman for the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
A resident assists in rescue efforts with his jet-ski in New Jersey. Photo: Reuters
Exelon Corp, the operator of the 43-year-old plant, insists there is no danger to equipment and no threat to public health or safety – and that the formal ‘alert’ notice was second from the bottom of a list of four that must be issued in the case of such incidents.
More than 80 cheek-by-jowl homes were gutted by fire at Breezy Point, in the New York borough of Queens, before hundreds of firemen managed to bring the blaze under control.
Almost 6000 flights were cancelled on Tuesday – on top of as many as 10,000 scrapped on Monday. Thereby, last year’s Hurricane Irene was edged out of the record books for the greatest number if US flights disrupted by a weather event.
A woman paddle-boards down a flooded city street in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy in Bethany Beach, Delaware. Photo: Reuters
Comparisons with the failed emergency services response to Hurricane Katrina, in 2005 on the watch of former Republican President George Bush, were inevitable and, it has to be said of the first 72 hours, were a striking contrast.
So much so that when a reported suggested to New Jersey governor Chris Christie, a stout defender of Mitt Romney and long reckoned as a possible vice presidential running mate for the Republican challenger for the presidency, Christie made a surprise lurch across the political spectrum to praise President Barack Obama.
“I have to say, the administration, the president, himself and FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate have been outstanding with us so far,” Christie told ABC’s Good Morning America. “We have a great partnership with them.”
Destruction … homes wrecked by Sandy in the Queens borough of New York. Photo: AFP
Christie spoke of how Obama had called him Monday night, offering to help in any way he could. As a result, New Jersey had been declared a major disaster area, for which federal funding would flow.
Smacking down a suggestion that he should invite Romney to New Jersey for a post-hurricane photo-op, Christie instead gave Obama another smooch – “I want to thank the president personally for his personal attention to this.”
With Obama’s disaster declarations still in force in New York, adjacent Long Island and in parts of New Jersey, the New York Stock Exchange announced plans to open as usual at 9.30am on Wednesday – but it was testing its contingency plan as well, “just in case.”
The evacuation at the height of the storm of more than 200 patients from the NYU Langone Medical Center, in Manhattan, when backup power system failed was managed without incident. Backup power reportedly failed at another city hospital – but after patients had been removed to other facilities.
New York City officials expected the Manhattan, Brooklyn, Williamsburg and Ed Koch Queensboro Bridges to reopen late on Tuesday morning. The Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel and Queens-Midtown Tunnel remain closed and the Lincoln Tunnel was open throughout the storm.
As cars floated down city streets late on Monday, the storm surge poured water into the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, flooding it “from end to end” only hours after State Governor Mario Cuomo had ordered it closed to traffic. Water also seeped into seven subway tunnels under the East River.
“In 108 years, our employees have never faced a challenge like the one that confronts us now,” Mr Joseph Lhota, head of the New York Metropolitan Transit Authority told reporters. “Our electrical systems, our alarm systems, tell us when there’s water down there –basically shut off in relatively quick fashion. They would only shut off if there was water down there.”
Governer Cuomo promised that bus services would be back by 5pm Tuesday.
As superstorm Sandy weakens – its winds have dropped to 65mph as it spews torrential rain and blizzard-like snow on a swathe through Pennsylvania and towards the Great Lakes – President Obama told its victim: “America is with you.”
“Obviously this is something that is heartbreaking for the entire nation,” he said while warning of possibly months of chaos ahead during a visit a Red Cross center in Washington.
“We certainly feel profoundly for all the families whose lives have been upended and are going to be going through some very tough times over the next several days, and perhaps several weeks and months.
“The most important message I have for them is that America is with you. We are standing behind you and we are going to do everything we can to help you get back on your feet.”
Mr Obama is to tour the crisis zones of New Jersey with state governor Chris Christie on Wednesday. But he said he had told local officials in the battered states, “If they are getting no for an answer somewhere in the federal government, they can call me personally at the White House – my message to the federal government is no bureaucracy, no red tape. Get resources where they are needed as fast as possible, as hard as possible, and for the duration.”
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