What's humankind's true role in Sandy's wrath?
Late last night, interviewing “in person absentee voters” at the “early polling” booths in Fairfax Virginia, I heard a once commonplace sound in America – a plane overhead. It was the first time I’d heard one in two days. Nearly 20,000 flights to, and from the US east coast have been cancelled by the doings of Hurricane Sandy.
It’s a staggering number, that leaves one thinking about emissions and noise pollution.
The very essence of climate change renders precision about man’s involvement all but impossible. Talk to 20,000 scientists and you will get 20,000 views on humankind’s contribution to the unprecedented events surrounding Sandy.
The surge in and around New York reached 14 feet.
That’s a third higher than any storm in the city’s recorded history. The New York subway has consequently suffered its worst damage since it was opened 108 years ago.
Severe flooding across NYC
Seven of the ten tunnels under the city’s east river are still flooded today.
Three quarters of a million New Yorkers are still without electricity and sanitation.
High-rise life was never designed to cope with carried water and unflushed loos. The damage, and loss of business to the US economy, is estimated by one prominent Wall Street source, to whom I have spoken, at $50bn.
Ever since the appalling failure of the UN climate summit in Copenhagen, political and media interest in global warming, and humankind’s involvement in causing it, has slithered down the agenda.
Here in America shale gas is the new, albeit polluting, “redeemer”.
With weather catastrophes closing nuclear plants from Japan and Germany to the US – five east coast nuclear plants are still shut down today – the nuclear alternative is looking at least windswept.
Man’s effect on global warming
It’s hard to remember that before Copenhagen, there was vast agreement across the scientific community as to the scale of man’s hand in global warming.
Today, the squabbling about our role in generating Sandy’s wrecking wrath is contrastingly sotto voce and deeply divided.
Before Copenhagen, the idea that a British government could change course on wind power, as is rumoured today, in so poignant a moment, would have been unthinkable.
My much better informed colleague, Tom Clarke, our science editor on Channel 4 News has been transmitting shocking evidence that he filmed in northern Greenland where ice fields are now open water.
There is evidence too that the atlantic ocean is warming. These, the scientists tell us, are two toxic ingredients that contribute to the making of hurricanes.
They contribute too to the wayward behaviour of the jet stream above the UK which has affected our own weather so badly this year.
Might it be best to presume that even if nature is in play, our flights, cars, central heating, air conditioning, and more, are also in play.
Post Copenhagen, have we got the balance between climate change believers and deniers wrong?
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