Is Sandy a taste of things to come?
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. More recent projections suggest that the melting of sea ice could mean a rise in excess of 30 inches. The New York State Sea Level Rise Task Force translated that into a local projection of 2 to 5 inches by the 2020s, and with rapid Arctic ice melt the rise could be as much as 5 to 10 inches over the next fifteen years. 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." Read more:
http://edition.cnn.com/2012/10/31/us/sandy-climate-change/index.html?hpt=hp_t1
