From The Blaze
Every time there’s a massive weather event — like Hurricane Sandy affecting much of the East Coast early this week — climatologists are called upon to answer the question of whether this weather is evidence of global warming. And while most would say an individual weather event cannot attributed as evidence of global warming, the link is still being made.
In fact, some climate scientists are taking a closer look at individual weather events and making an effort to quantify climate change’s role in contributing to it.
Although trends in changing climate are generally tracked over years, not just by the weather outside your window, as it’s often put, NPR’s Adam Frank reported several researchers are looking at various aspects of individual weather events and the influence of climate change:
Researchers like Randall Dole of NOAA, for example, might ask what percentage of an extreme event’s magnitude came from a changing climate. Peter Stott of the UK Met Office frames the question differently. He looks at the odds for a given extreme weather event to occur given human-driven climate change. Kevin Trenberth of NCAR takes a third view, asking: Given a changed background climate, how should we expect weather to change?
Read more here.
This type of event is certainly not unprecedented, and something like it happens just about every year…just not over the Northeast U.S. These events are somewhat more common in the northwest Pacific Ocean or farther north in the Atlantic Ocean. We did an internal study of these events about ten years ago (never published) using QuikScat, AMSU, and buoy data, and it is amazing just how strong some of these hybrid winter storms can get.
So, while Frankenstorm Sandy will indeed have great local significance, it is premature to claim it has any global significance, such as a response to global warming. We would need to see more of these events occurring over many years, on a quasi-global basis…and even then the increase would need to be shown to be unrelated to natural climate modes of variability, such as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation or Arctic Oscillation. -Dr. Roy Spencer
Really? So there are storms as big as Sandy every year in North America?
Yes, really. These events do indeed occur often, especially in the areas outlined in the reply by Neilio. Local geographical factors play a far greater role in creating the conditions required for a certain type of storm to occur (ex. the U.S. Midwest experiences far more tornadoes than anywhere else), and it would do you a lot of good ‘Gay Boy’ to actually READ what people write here. One of the favoured tactics employed by the global warming cultists to attempt to discredit opposition to their warped agenda is to deliberately misrepresent the claims made by those they don’t like (i.e sensible, intelligent and independent people who haven’t been brainwashed by all the scare-mongering global-warming baloney).