What did you think as you watched Hurricane Sandy evolve into Superstorm Sandy?
Well for me the movie “Day after Tomorrow” starring Dennis Quaid and the”Perfect Storm” with George Clooney  came to  mind.  So is art becoming reality or is Climate Change an issue that we need to address right now!   What are the costs attributable to superstorms?  The estimates of damages are just being put together but preliminary estimates range from 25 to 50 Billion dollars.   Needless to say, the reports of 3 feet of snow in the Appalachians, a foot of rain in the coastal areas, 20 foot waves in Lake Michigan, 32 foot waves in New York Harbor, the NYC Subway System flooded and horrible destruction up and down the Atlantic Seaboard all from one storm indicates “weather gone wild!”  This storm coupled with the meteorological data that indicates that so far 2012 is down in the record books as the warmest ever recorded.  As noted Environmental Journalist Bill McKibben has stated in his latest interview  “If there ever was a wake up call, this is it!”

Bill McKibben on Hurricane Sandy and Climate Change: “If There …

Sandy was a Record Setting Storm

While only a category 1 storm, Sandy set a record for size with a width of over 1,000 miles and record setting pressure of 940 Millibars. The lower the pressure, the stronger the storm.

Per CNN, When hurricane hunter aircraft measured its central pressure at 940 millibars — 27.76 inches — Monday afternoon, it was the lowest barometric reading ever recorded for an Atlantic storm to make landfall north of Cape Hatteras, North Carolina. The previous record holder was the 1938 “Long Island Express” Hurricane, which dropped as low as 946 millibars.

Blogs and News Agencies Raise the Connection Question

Bloggers and journalists are all making a connection of this storm with climate change.  What is the connection between this storm and climate change, global warming, arctic ice melting, sea water levels rising and whatever goes with those measured phenomena. Well maybe it could just be the continued and increasing burning of fossil fuels that leads to the unabated and historic rise in CO2 levels in the atmosphere.  Maybe its fueled (no pun intended) from the thirst for huge profits for our major oil and coal companies that keep our politicians from recognizing the facts and acting on them.  But whatever the cause may be, somethings happening.  Whether you are a denialist or a believer in climate change wouldn’t you think that mankind should do whatever is humanly possible to try to stop the formation of these superstorms? What can we do besides watch storms like Sandy continue in the future?  Urge your Government Officials to work toward reducing CO2 emissions and develop clean energy alternatives now, not later!

Climate Change goes Mainstream

An important phenomena to understand is that many mainstream news agencies are talking about Climate Change!  CBS News just conducted an interview about Sandy with City University of NY Professor of Meteorology Michio Kiku who previously had been a “Global Warming” skeptic.  His opinion was that there were too many factors pointing to human caused climate change to ignore.  See the interview at the following link;

Superstorm Sandy brings climate change back into focus – CBS News Video

Here’s a quote I read recently in the book “Storm” by George R. Stewart from Sir Napier Shaw from the 1919 Manual of Meteorology:I 123 and inventor of the term Millibar.

“Every theory of the course of events in nature is necessarily based on some process of simplification of the phenomena and is to some extent therefore a fairy tale.”

Unfortunately Superstorm Sandy was not a fairy tale.