"Hall and Sobel report their findings in a paper published last week (29 May 2013) in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union."...
7/12/13, "Hurricane Sandy Was 1-in-700-Year Event," LiveScience.com, Elizabeth Howell
"Hurricane Sandy's devastating storm track is a rare one among hurricanes; a new statistical analysis estimates that the track of the storm — which took an unusual left-hand turn in the Atlantic before slamming into the East Coast — has an average probability of happening only once every 700 years.
"The particular shape of Sandy's trajectory is very peculiar, and that's very rare, on the order of once every 700 years," said Timothy Hall, a senior scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies who co-authored the study. That means that in any particular year, the chance of such a storm track happening is 0.0014 percent. The storm's near-perpendicular strike on the coast was a major factor in the severe flooding seen in New York, New Jersey and other nearby states, Hall added. But the rareness of the storm's track doesn't mean that the coast is safe from other severe storms." via Tom Nelson, via Junk Science
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5/28/13, "On the impact angle of Hurricane Sandy's New Jersey landfall," Geophysical Research Letters, Hall and Sobel
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6/3/13, "Hurricane Sandy took highly unusual path, but climate change doesn’t get the blame – yet," blogs.AGU.org, by Sarah Charley
"Hurricane Sandy’s peculiar path was exceedingly rare, but whether or not climate change influenced the trajectory remains unknown, new research suggests.
Sandy differed from most North Atlantic hurricanes by veering west over the northeastern United States and merging with a winter storm. But nothing proved more unusual about the “superstorm,” the authors of the study note, than the nearly perpendicular angle at which the storm approached the New Jersey shoreline and collided with the coast on October 29, 2012. Usually, hurricanes graze the coast rather than plunging into it head on.
In this new study, which evaluates how frequently hurricanes with near-perpendicular tracks should impact the U.S. East Coast, Timothy Hall of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Adam Sobel of Columbia University, both in New York City, ran statistical simulations of millions of Atlantic hurricanes—the equivalent of 50,000 years’ worth of the storms—under conditions representing the average regional climate between 1950 and 2010.
Sandy’s remarkable perpendicularity fueled the storm’s fury, Hall notes. “When storms graze the coast, they don’t have as much time to build up large amounts of water,” he said. “But when they hit dead on, they can move a lot of water and increase the height of the storm surge, causing extensive flooding like Sandy did.”
But that near-perpendicular path also made Sandy a highly unlikely occurrence under late 20th – early 21st century climate conditions, the authors found. A hurricane with a track resembling Sandy’s is likely to occur on average only once in about 700 years, their simulations showed. The researchers had to simulate vast numbers of “synthetic tropical cyclones” in order to produce enough of the rare few that hit the coast almost perpendicularly to come up with a meaningful time scale for the interval between such storms.
In a historical record dating back to 1851 that the team consulted, no other hurricane of equal or greater strength had hit land at an angle anywhere near as perpendicular as Sandy, whose path was off by just 17 degrees from making a right angle with the coast.
Hall and Sobel report their findings in a paper published last week (29 May 2013) in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union. Their results agree with two other studies that predicted hurricanes would impact Manhattan with Sandy’s 9-foot surge or greater once every 400-800 years. “We had completely different models and were looking at different things, but our results overlapped,” Hall said. “This points to a very unusual storm.”
Despite speculation that Sandy was the result of climate change, Hall stresses that as of right now, it is impossible to know. “This is a baseline estimate for how rare an event like this is, given steady-state climate,” Hall said. “If we see an increase in frequency, then we know changes in the climate are changing the probability.”
It’s like rolling dice, Hall said, except if climate change is having an influence, they’re loaded dice: “If one year you get a six, it’s impossible to know whether that six was the result of random chance or something else” he explained. “But if you keep getting sixes, you know the dice are weighted.”
Typically, North Atlantic hurricanes are pushed eastward by the jet stream as they approach higher latitudes, Hall said. However, the year Sandy occurred, a meander in the jet stream diminished this effect. Some scientists speculate that climate change is weakening the jet stream and increasing its tendency to meander, but Hall contends that it’s too soon to tell.
“There are some theories that melting sea ice affects the jet stream, but there are other models that show the opposite,” Hall said. “We don’t really know yet.”
If Sandy’s path was an anomaly and not a product of climate change, the planet’s warming nonetheless contributed to the damage Sandy inflicted on coastal communities, according to Hall.
The combination of Sandy’s storm surge plus high tides raised water levels to a 14-foot peak at Battery Park in southern Manhattan. “In the past 100 years, mean sea level at the Battery has increased by roughly one foot,” noted Hall. “So, one foot out of 14 was due to sea-level increase.”"
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Ed. note: Near the end of the article the author refers to "the planet's warming," but the scientific consensus states that no global warming has taken place for at least 15 years. Even if "man caused global warming" exists and is caused by human CO2, US CO2 has plunged over the past two decades. The US leads the world
in CO2 reduction as other countries' CO2 continues to rise. As to sea level, it rises and falls at different rates around the world. If it rose in New York, it fell in other places. The hypothesis of CO2 danger and sea level at no time states that an estimate of NY City sea level over one period of time represents the entire planet. The author is correct that Sandy hit at high tide's peak.
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2/21/13, “IPCC Head Pachauri Acknowledges Global Warming Standstill,” The Australian, Graham Lloyd
"The UN’s climate change chief, Rajendra Pachauri, has acknowledged a 17-year pause in global temperature rises, confirmed recently by Britain’s Met Office."...
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6/11/13, "What to make of a warming plateau," NY Times, Justin Gillis
"As unlikely as this may sound, we have lucked out in recent years when it comes to global warming. The rise in the surface temperature of earth has been markedly slower over the last 15 years than in the 20 years before that. And that lull in warming has occurred even as greenhouse gases have accumulated in the atmosphere at a record pace. The slowdown is a bit of a mystery to climate scientists....But given how much is riding on the scientific forecast, the practitioners of climate science would like to understand exactly what is going on."...
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1/18/13, UK Met Office says no warming since 1998:
1/18/13, “Climate change: scientists puzzle over halt in global warming,” Der Spiegel, by Axel Bojanowski (translation from German). Chart by UK Met Office, via Der Spiegel
.Der Spiegel (chart above, UK Met Office)
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6/4/12, “Climate change stunner: USA leads world in CO2 cuts since 2006,” Vancouver Observer, Saxifrage
“Not only that, but as my top chart shows, US CO2 emissions are falling even faster than what President Obama pledged in the global Copenhagen Accord.”…
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8/16/12, "Bentek says that power companies plan to retire 175 coal-fired plants over the next five years [by 2017]. That could bring coal's CO2 emissions down to 1980 levels."...
8/16/12, “AP IMPACT: CO2 emissions in US drop to 20-year low,” AP, Kevin Begos
“In a surprising turnaround, the amount of carbon dioxide being released into the atmosphere in the U.S. has fallen dramatically to its lowest level in 20 years and government officials say the biggest reason is that cheap and plentiful natural gas has led many power plant operators to switch from dirtier-burning coal.
Many of the world's leading climate scientists didn't see the drop coming in large part because it happened as a result of market forces rather than direct government action against carbon dioxide....
In a little-noticed technical report, the U.S. Energy Information Agency, a part of the Energy Department, said this month that energy related U.S. CO2 emissions for the first four months of this year fell to about 1992 levels."...
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Sea level constantly varies around the world:
12/2/10, "The Uncertainties of Global Warming: Sea Level Could Rise in South, Fall in North," Der Spiegel, Gerald Traufetter, "Surprises for Scientists"
"The flood of data from the orbiting satellite has produced all kinds of surprises for scientists in recent years. For instance, while seas have risen by about 15 centimeters in the tropical Western Pacific, the ocean near San Francisco has fallen by about the same amount....
Such effects are the result of natural fluctuations that unfold over decades. The currents in the world's oceans are constantly shifting....In the Indian Ocean, the sea level is about 100 meters (330 feet) below the average, while the waters around Iceland are 60 meters above the average."...
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5/17/13, "World’s biggest ice sheets likely more stable than previously believed," CIFAR, Canadian Institute for Advanced Research
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6/10/13, "US Carbon Dioxide Emissions Fall as Global Emissions Rise," Cato.org, Paul C. 'Chip' Knappenberger
"Notice that the U.S. is far and away the leader in reducing carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, while China primarily is responsible for pushing global CO2 emissions higher. In fact, CO2 emissions growth in China more than offsets all the CO2 savings that we have achieved in the U.S."
Chart from IEA report, p. 2
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NOAA scientist led study says 2012 US weather extremes were caused naturally, not by human CO2:
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4/12/13, "Study Reveals Global Warming Not To Blame For Last Year’s Crippling Drought," stlouis.cbslocal.com with AP
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"The study conducted by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Drought Task Force places the blame on natural variations."...
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Three weeks after NASA study declaring Sandy wasn't due to man caused global warming, both NY Times and LA Times ignore the science and write editorials saying Sandy was due to man caused global warming:
6/22/13, "The Sandy Imperative," New York Times Editorial Board
"Mayor Michael Bloomberg has done his successor a huge favor in laying out an ambitious plan to help the city cope with a changing climate. In an era of
rising seawater, temperature extremes and superstorms,
the next mayor has a duty to manage the growing risk of natural disaster.
Mr. Bloomberg’s plan calls for new fortifications to keep homes and businesses dry, to keep the trains running and the lights on. It envisions spending almost $20 billion over 10 years, a price tag that will inevitably swell. His successor will have to find enough money and will have to push through long-term investments in infrastructure, despite constrained budgets and short-term emergencies."...
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6/20/13, "The time for climate action is now," LA Times Editorial Board
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"New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg is among the few officials to recognize that decades of inaction on climate change are shaping the present, not just the future.
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"Hurricane Sandy has come and gone, so it might seem crazy that New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg recently announced a $20-billion proposal to construct levees and shore up hospitals to protect his city from storms and rising seas."...
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Neither NY Times nor LA Times mention CO2 spewing billionaire Mike Bloomberg is the "single largest user of scarce slots allocated to private aircraft at La Guardia airport" and likely New York City's single biggest polluter. Reputation insurance purchased from the Sierra Club notwithstanding. If someone knows global warming didn't cause Sandy but keeps telling taxpayers it did, and that therefore taxpayers must spend $20 billion--shouldn't they be in jail or at least a mental hospital? Measures should of course be taken to protect areas from normal weather events, but not in the name of CO2 terror.
2/14/11, “Flight records uncover elusive Mayor’s tracks,” WSJ, Maremont, McGinty, Saul
"The records also show that the Bloomberg fleet has been the single largest user of scarce slots allocated to private aircraft at La Guardia airport. The flights continued apace even after the mayor two years ago called for curbs on small commercial planes at La Guardia and other area airports to reduce congestion." ...
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News of US CO2 plunge has been described as:
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