The question that everyone has been asking, causing the climate skeptics to go into damage control was whether Sandy was a result of climate change? The scientific opinion is that, while no single event can be directly attributed to human caused global warming, this “new normal”, the ongoing and increasing number of extreme events over the past decade, is exactly what the model projections have forecast.
The extreme heatwaves and droughts of Europe, Africa and the US, the unprecedented floods in Pakistan, Australia and throughout Asia are all symptoms of a changing global climate.
The loss of eighty per cent of the Arctic sea ice this year is another wake-up call, and we continue to deny the reality of our own eyes.
After every disaster, FOX NEWS lines up the same familiar quasi experts to assure us that what we are seeing is actually not happening. If the Arctic melts away, discuss the Antarctic instead, tell us that a similar Russian heatwave and drought occurred 1000 years ago, before the industrial revolution, before SUVs. “We do not deny climate change”, chant the skeptics, we just deny the last century of science that reveals the current human cause.
What we do know is that the ocean is a little bit warmer now, there is a bit more energy in the system; both increase the severity.
Sandy’s track was directed towards the US, due to atmospheric changes, the result of the loss of Arctic sea ice this year. Of course we can find some oil industry-paid misinformer to give us half truths and irrelevant facts to tell us that it is just yet another fluke in the seemingly endless flukes of the last decade and airbrush it from our reality. While this may be the new normal, the coming new extreme events may test the limits of our imagination.
We need to act now
John Byatt
Cooloola Cove
