On Monday of this week, three prominent and influential scientists published an opinion piece in Politico arguing that anthropogenic global warming was responsible for making the destruction from “super storm” Sandy significantly worse than it otherwise would have been. They added that if we don’t “cut industrial carbon pollution,” we are going to get more of the same, and then some.
On the same day, I argued here at Cato@Liberty that it could be reasoned that anthropogenic global warming lessened the impact of Sandy.
The scientific truth about the situation is that it is impossible to know who is right—the uncertainties are just too large. But I think it is fair to say that no matter what direction the influence of anthropogenic global warming was on Sandy, in net it was quite small.
One difference between my piece and the Politico article co-signed by Dr. Robert Corell (“senior policy fellow for the American Meteorological Society and former Chair of the United States Global Change Research Program”), Dr. Jeff Masters (“the founder and Director of Meteorology for Weather Underground and a former NOAA Hurricane Hunter”) and Dr. Kevin Trenberth (“Distinguished Senior Scientist in the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research”) was that I tried to stick to a scientifically defensible argument. In their piece, they juiced up their case with some—how should I say this?—rather dubious facts.
The worst of these was claiming that “[o]n the stretch of the Atlantic Coast that spans from Norfolk to Boston, sea levels have been rising four times faster than the global average.” They implied that anthropogenic global warming was the reason why.
This is simply untrue.
Read more at http://www.cato.org/blog/arguing-over-sandy
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