Experts: Sandy's Terrible Impact no Surprise

Unless one is in a coma - or a Neanderthal member of the Republican Party or the Koch brothers who seek to amass more and more wealth at any cost - it ought to be obvious that something is happening to the world's climate and that mankind needs to pay attention to its role in the causation of the violent changes taking place.  This year has seen record heat, far more tropical storms and hurricanes than are the norm, and the sea levels are rising.  Yet Republicans at both the federal and state level (Virginia has more than its share of flat earth believers in the Virginia GOP) continue to deny the reality that something troublesome is happening.  CNN is carrying an article that more or less states we'd better get used to more events like Hurricane Sandy.  And for coastal cities, that means waking up to the need to commence construction of meaningful protections against storm surges.  Here are article excerpts:

(CNN) -- We should not be surprised. That's the view of many climate scientists as they survey the destruction wrought by the superstorm that ravaged the Northeast this week. The melting of Arctic ice, rising sea levels, the warming atmosphere and changes to weather patterns are a potent combination likely to produce storms and tidal surges of unprecedented intensity, according to many experts.

Recognizing the threat, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is developing a strategy for mitigating the growing risk from storm surges and flooding along the city's 500 miles of coastline. In such a densely-populated area of so much expensive real estate, surrounded by a complex web of estuaries, tides and ocean, it is a huge challenge. And in the face of global changes, even a city as inventive as New York can only do so much.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicted in 2007 that the global average sea level would rise between seven and 23 inches by the end of this century.  .  .  .  . Combine that with a trend toward more intense storms and New York is "highly vulnerable," professor Michael Oppenheimer of Princeton University told CNN.  "(Superstorm) Sandy is a foretaste of things to come," he predicted, "from the combination of bigger storms and higher sea levels, both of which contribute equally to the growing threat."

Oppenheimer, a professor of geosciences, recently modeled the effect of climate change on storm surges for the New York area. In a paper published by Nature in February, he and three colleagues concluded that the "storm of the century" would become the storm of "every twenty years or less."

The conclusion of Oppenheimer and his colleagues is that storms will become larger and more powerful.   "Climate change will probably increase storm intensity and size simultaneously, resulting in a significant intensification of storm surges," they wrote. Sandy had a diameter of some 900 miles, much larger than most storms.

A growing body of evidence links the disappearance of summer ice cover in the Arctic with changing weather patterns.  Over the past three decades, about 1.3 million square miles of Arctic sea ice has disappeared, equivalent to 42 percent of the area of the lower 48 states.  .  .  .  .  Less sea ice means warmer water. Sea surface temperatures off the coast of the northeast United States are now the highest ever recorded.

Given the scale of the challenge, Oppenheimer and others believe there needs to be urgent remedial action to mitigate the effects, such as raising subway entrances and reinforcing the lower floors of buildings. At the moment, Oppenheimer said, there's a lot of evaluating hazards and too little action to address them.

Douglas Hill of the Storm Surge Research Group at Stony Brook University has proposed a chain of massive sea barriers in Long Island Sound that could be closed to prevent flooding whenever a storm surge threatens. One would be close to the Verrazano Narrows bridge. (The Thames Barrier in London performs such a role in a more modest way.) But the cost would probably exceed $10 billion; a barrier in Venice cost $7 billion.

Whether Sandy will drive the issue of climate change up the political agenda seems doubtful. According to a recent Pew Research Center poll, 67% of Americans believe the Earth is warming, up slightly since 2010, but that's 10 percentage points less than in 2006. Among both Democrats and Republicans, the percentage has declined, as has the number (now 64%) who say it's a serious problem.