The largest hurricane recorded is underway, and it’s hitting the US and Canada. Is it because of climate change? The short answer is, yes. If you’re asking that question because you’re wondering if climate change is real, the answer is, yes it is real and we have to make a better effort to reduce greenhouse gas pollution immediately.
Wind blowing people over will become a lot more common if we don’t convince our politicians to collectively act where individuals cannot. Centuries ago, it used to be that the punishment for ignoring reality was your own obscurity and demise. With a socialized state, industrial revolution, and global economy, the consequences of teeming masses of people willing to ignore reality results in economic and ecological collapse. Good luck getting Harper’s government to care while they are busy making money, and stripping power from the people.
ADDED:
Science is not a topic suitable only to a limited number of people. It’s essential that our political leaders, and our people understand it enough to make long term decisions that don’t jeopardize our health and safety. Presently, the debate is too charged with rhetoric paid for by people who have no interest in science, but have found a willing audience who gladly take hold of the escape that denial offers. You only need to read the people raving about socialist plots in my own blog’s comment sections to find people so deranged and out of touch with the reality that can literally blow them over and flood their city.
Saskboy's Abandoned Stuff 
The corporatist petro-state Canada has become will never effectively price carbon for major emitters. Imposing realistic charges for water as well as for carbon emissions, tailing ponds, etc. would be a wounding, perhaps mortal blow to tar sands development.
Because we’ve been able to measure the size of hurricanes for so long, right? Maybe this little clip will help educate you and your readers about assumptions, especially about hurricanes:
Satellites
Prior to technology used to develop and launch satellites, it was difficult for meteorologists to determine just where tropical cyclones formed. For years and even decades, they relied largely on ship and tropical island weather observations and coastal radars.
The first satellite sent up by the United States to monitor weather conditions was TIROS in 1960. Though its capabilities were primitive compared to today’s satellite technology, TIROS it opened the door for meteorologists to understand a great deal more about tropical cyclones.
The story of Hurricane Camille illustrates advances in weather information learned through the use of satellites. In 1969, meteorologists knew relatively little about the appearance of hurricanes on satellite images compared to the images they study today. It was thought that the larger the overall cloud pattern appeared on the satellite image, the more intense the tropical cyclone might be.
Hurricane Camille’s cloud pattern did not cover a large area. Based upon the belief that the larger the cloud area, the stronger the storm, meteorologists did not realize they were dealing with a Category 5 hurricane until reconnaissance pilots flew into its eye and discovered Camille’s extraordinary intensity.
Meteorologists soon realized that the symmetry of cloud patterns and the character of the hurricane’s eye relative to its CDO (Central Dense Overcast) that provided a better estimate of a tropical cyclone’s strength.
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But honestly I don’t hold out much hope for you zealots of the ecological faith.
Do you care to cite your source oh expert of hurricanes? http://www.theweatherchannelkids.com/weather-ed/weather-encyclopedia/hurricanes-and-tropical-systems/forecasting-hurricanes/ OK?
Talking about cite’s, love the one about “Wind blowing people over will become a lot more common” especially since it was from way back in 2010!!!! Haha!!! No elderly folk in a walker tip over since??? Seriously tho, you couldn’t find any more convincing proof of globull warming other than a two year old story about a senior falling over?
[ADMIN note: Go away you humourless troll.]
No wonder the fearmongering is dying.
PS… It’s my understanding that “the largest hurricane recorded” was nothing more than a tropical storm at landfall? Or did it squeek thru’ as a bottom rung ‘cane after all? Clearly you can see the unbelievable storm surge on these Atlantic City flower pots!!!!! One even fell over!!!!! Oh the huge manatee!!! videos.nj.com/star-ledger/2012/10/time_lapse_of_atlantic_city_in.html
More… ahem… anti-socialist science!! Tommy Douglas style!!!
“to call Sandy a harbinger of a “new normal,” in which unprecedented weather events cause unprecedented destruction, would be wrong.”
-(Sandy) would rank as the 17th most damaging hurricane or tropical storm (out of 242) to hit the U.S. since 1900—a significant event, but not close to the top 10.
-from August 1954 through August 1955, the East Coast saw three different storms make landfall—Carol, Hazel and Diane—that in 2012 each would have caused about twice as much damage as Sandy.
-The last Category 3 or stronger storm to make landfall was Wilma in 2005. The more than seven years since then is the longest such span in over a century.
-Flood damage has decreased as a proportion of the economy since reliable records were first kept… there is no evidence of increasing extreme river floods.
-Historic tornado damage (adjusted for changing levels of development) has decreased since 1950, paralleling a dramatic reduction in casualties.
-IPCC reports that drought in America’s central plains has decreased in recent decades.
Mr. Pielke is a professor of environmental studies and a fellow of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204840504578089413659452702.html?mod=googlenews_wsj
Or there’s the Fruitfly’s ‘reality’. Then again he is a paid lobbyist.
Getting windy in Toronto, I’ll tell you!
The short answer may be “yes” but the correct answer is NO. Attribution of a single weather event is impossible to connect with globull warming. Even ‘the concensus’ scientific establishment acknowledges this. It is only the eco-wingnuts that think this way… which sadly, undermines their cause… ludditism!
The UK Met say’s that the global average temperature has not changed in 16 years. Why then is this “Frankenstorm” not a regular event? When, if it is becoming “more common”, was the last major hurricane (cat 3+) strike on US soil? Seven years? How do you explain the great Atlantic storm of 1962? 1938? 1954? 1944? 1950? 1888? How do you explain that meteorologist Dr. Ryan Maue has shown a negative 30 year trend in hurricane activity?
Is globull warming responsible for the current lull in tornadoes? You don’t hear about tornadoes this year cuz’ it’s not the weather-du-jour!!! Antarctic ice at record levels photo ops?
To paraphrase…’Centuries ago, it used to be that the punishment to witches for ignoring piousness was their demise’. We have CO2 witchery now!
At least we have now turned the corner and globull warming, ummmm change, ummmm disruption, ummmm whatever you kids are callin’ it now, is finally being relegated to the dustbin of scientific history… not unlike the flat earth and eugenics (special shout out to Tommy Douglas “Biographies and other accounts of Mr. Douglas’s life have either ignored or down-played his striking embrace in the mid-1930s of forced sterilization and segregation for people of “sub-normal” intelligence and morality, says Dr. Michael Shevell in a newly published academic paper. http://news.nationalpost.com/2012/03/14/tommy-douglas/ )
Science never has been an NDPQ strength.
It’s nice of you to stop by and demonstrate how deranged the right wing has become. Even weather is a socialist plot, because you bring up Tommy Douglas as somehow related. Complete with your poor spelling and made up political conspiracies, you paint a picture helping less gifted people everywhere into accepting they own ignorance as normal because an anonymous troll on the Net feels the same way.
How ’bout a nice cite and source then?!?!!?!….
“Great events can have little causes. In this case, the immediate cause is most likely little more that the coincidental alignment of a tropical storm with an extratropical storm. Both frequent the west Atlantic in October…nothing unusual with that. On rare occasions their timing is such as to result in an interaction which can lead to an extreme event along the eastern seaboard. As to underlying causes, neither the frequency of tropical or extratropical cyclones over the North Atlantic are projected to appreciably change due to climate change, nor have there been indications of a change in their statistical behavior over this region in recent decades (see IPCC 2012 SREX report)” dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/28/the-frankenstorm-in-climate-context/
“So, while it will rain like “black cats and Frankenweenies” over the midatlantic, this is not some spell conjured upon us by great external forces….unless you believe in the monster flicks of Universal Stuidios fame!” Both Martin Hoerling meteorologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The point of the attribution to climate change is as the WashPo said all weather is indicative of climate change rather than none, because we exist in a climate changed, and changing due to pollution.
There are people asking about it because they don’t understand climate change is real, and are looking for any excuse to deny its impact.
Who can say if Sandy would have happened without climate change? Could a butterfly flapping its wings cause a hurricane after time?
What we do know is climate change as we hear it described these days refers to the unnatural warming of our climate due to greenhouse gas pollution, and it’s plainly real. So, do all weather systems now lend their creation to climate change? Not exactly, and we’d have weather regardless, but it’s obvious that that we can’t discount the probability that climate change is involved in some aspects of every storm on earth now, including Sandy.
http://climatecrocks.com/2012/10/30/sandy-and-climate-right-or-wrong-media-now-going-there/
Herein lies the error of your ways. You are completely off the mark when you say “all weather is indicative of climate change (rather than none)”. Especially when there is absolutely nothing new about the weather! Rather, all weather is indicative of climate continuity! Big storms, heatwaves, colds, flood and drought have all happened before. The only difference is now (as rat put it) eco-zealots are taking it as a blasphemy against their gods.
It also causes your theory of globull warming to collapse. If ‘everything is indicative of change’ your theory becomes unfalsifiable. As it is unfalsifiable it also is untestable and therefore provable. It becomes a belief, a tenet of faith and thus nothing to do with science.
Think of such a theory’s predictability… a single set of parameters could give infinite results, each one being looked upon as a proof and validation of the theory. Yet for the theory to work, only one outcome would be predicted and found correct. Not so with globull warming. ‘Everything’ is indicative!
I do appreciate you coming around to your more conservative viewpoint, after all it’s quite a comedown starting off from “Is it (the largest hurricane) because of climate change? The short answer is, yes” to “Who can say if Sandy would have happened without climate change?… do all weather systems now lend their creation to climate change? Not exactly, and we’d have weather regardless”!!!
Yer comin’ round boy! ;)
Redjeff, you cite science when you think it benefits you, while your whole point is to fan the flames of ignorance which are burning our world. If you’d bothered to read the article
http://boingboing.net/2012/10/29/did-climate-change-cause-hurri.html
You’d have seen the context for this discussion, and why the short answer is “yes”.
Your opinion, while backed by the simple point that we cannot yet say with scientific certainty that Sandy is how it has been due to climate change without years of data study and comparison, is going to ultimately be futile. Your point is to try and disprove climate change has an impact on weather events occurring today, and into our near future. You will be proven to be wrong, for the reasons I’ve given, and the reasons provided in that article.
Climate change is a scientific fact. It’s a fact that Sandy was impacted by climate change (it cannot be any other way, because a storm does not exist in a theoretical vacuum apart from the real world.) A child can understand that we add a lot of greenhouse gas to the atmosphere, and greenhouse gas warms the planet. People who say climate change is not fact, are either duped, or lying (or were duped, and decided lying is a way to save face). Which are you?
And by the way, I heard the same logical fallacy just last night from someone else who doesn’t understand science, or climate change, but FEELS they are more authoritative than those who do because they suspect a socialist plot like the one you were raving about earlier.
Just because there’s always been severe weather, and climate cycles, doesn’t discount the probability that the cycle is being changed, and weather obviously too.
Yahhhhh, that sciency think can be a pain when it contradicts ones theology. And if you mean by pointing out inconsistancies, mistakes and flat out lies of the Alarmist Empire(TM) when you say I “fan the flames of ignorance” I don’t consider you ignorant, I consider you gullible. By the way, the UN is missing 50 million climate refugees they said would be there by 2010. Saskatchewan is a pretty big place, seen any around? Could be hiding.
While admitting that there is no way of knowing that Sandy may or may not have been impacted by globull warming, you proceed to say that Sandy was impacted by globull warming. That makes no sense.
As for your climate change/weather impacts, and that climate is the sum of weather averaged out, it would be no different than saying which came first, the chicken or the egg. By the way, alarmists remind me EVERY winter that weather is NOT climate!!! Ha ha!!!! Unless it’s warm, of course… then it’s proof of globull warming. Or at least you “can’t discount the probability”!!
As for my feelings, ha ha, maybe, just maybe, I feel that way because, as you say yourself… “Redjeff, you cite science”!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Ah Simon, you make me giggle!
Oh, and one more thing… I find it blisteringly (hellfire?) ironic that one of your references (specifically ourfuture.org/blog-entry/2012104429/hurricane-sandy-gods-punishment-no-mention-global-warming-debates ) makes mockery of the, ahem, how shall we say, more extreme Christian view that Sandy was Gods warning to us about gays and abortions. And mockery rightfully so.
He then goes on to say “No matter what you consider “God” to mean, clearly this “unprecedented” hurricane, arriving just before the election is a signal to all of us…”!!!!!!!
Yahhhh!!!!! Thats right!!!! He mocks one faiths interpretation then turns around and sez HIS faiths “signal” is the TRUE ONE!!!!!!!!!!!
I near wet my pants!!!!!!! I had to read it 4 times!!!!! Seriously, is Mother Gaia sending us this “signal”? Are only the truely carbon penitent worthy of this message? Are her climate ‘apostles’ spreading the word? Can I receive my indulgences now if I repent?
Brother, for a lefty your life is sure based a lot on faith. And thats a good thing.
Aren’t you the one attributing the signal to a fictional sky mother? Signals can come from a lamp post, and fools ignore those too; Red light Jeff.
Wha????? Your ecoligion is polytheistic?
These lamp post signals… do they talk to you or are they telepathic?
Open and honest, simple question.
How many people are following a doctrine of the age-old practice of treating natural disasters as judgments upon mankind?
My “feeling” is it is a backward and regressive tendency. Brought on by the guilt of success.
Opinions?
“Honest”? You pathetic hack. You wouldn’t know “honest” if it fucked you up the ass.
So that’s one undecided.