Tag Archives: Sandy

Hurricane Sandy and how global warming may have contributed to its destructiveness.

Hurricane Sandy approaching The Statue of Liberty.

For the past several centuries humanity has experienced a lot of natural disasters like tornadoes, hurricanes, tsunamis and even earthquakes. Millions of people died because of such events but nothing changed ever since. In the 21st century the amount of natural disasters seems to grow and the recent events which have occurred in the  Caribbean and the Mid-Atlantic and Northeastern United States during late October 2012 have shown that we’re not protected by the modern technology and that we need to start thinking about the reasons behind such disasters. “Preliminary estimates of losses due to damage and business interruption are estimated at $65.6 billion (2012 USD), which would make it the second-costliest Atlantic hurricane, behind only Hurricane Katrina. At least 253 people were killed along the path of the storm in seven countries. The severe and widespread damage the storm caused in the United States, as well as its unusual merge with a frontal system, led the media and several government agencies to nickname the hurricane Superstorm Sandy.” – Article by Wikipedia clearly shows us how dangerous can such disasters be for humanity, but the most important question is if the hurricane could be caused by the Global Warming effect. For now, it is already clear that the climate change may have contributed a lot to Sandy’s impacts worse than it could have been.

Hurricane Sandy in NY.

There are several ways how the climate changes might have changed the impacts: sea level rise; anomalous warm sea surface temperatures; and possibly because of an unusual weather environment that some scientists think started the rapid disappearing Arctic sea ice. Let’s have a detailed look on these possible cases.

Firstly, “Water temperatures off the East Coast were unusually warm this summer — so much so that New England fisheries officials observed significant shifts northward in cold water fish such as cod” – Mentions huffingtonpost.com. This leads us to a conclusion that Hurricane Sandy might have used such environment because it is the ideal energy source for the hurricane.  Secondly,  an anomalous weather pattern in the northern hemisphere made Hurricane Sandy much more worse as well as for many other people on the East coast. Thirdly, scientists came to conclusion that the recent frequent events might be related to the loss of Arctic ice, which could be one of the most visible consequences of modern global warming. “Global warming heated the water of the Gulf and Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean, resulting in greatly increased energy and water vapor in the air above the water. When that happens, extremely energetic and wet storms occur more frequently and ferociously. These systemic effects of global warming came together to produce the ferocity and magnitude of Hurricane Sandy.” – States George Lakoff, professor of linguistics in his blog(http://blogs.berkeley.edu).

 

These conclusions clearly show us that recent man-made Global Waming has contributed quite a lot to Hurricane Sandy and if we still keep not caring about this problem – the disasters which might occur in future might be fatal for everyone on the Earth.