An Oct. 29 map of Sandy swirling over the Northeast.It wasn’t supposed to happen. That’s what the weather experts kept saying immediately before, during and after Sandy smacked New Jersey in the face. Not this far north, they said, not in autumn, and certainly not this bad.
Which is why the global warming finger-pointing that usually begins after a natural disaster, preceded this one. But six weeks before Sandy was even a specter threatening the Caribbean, Rutgers scientist Jennifer Francis — not your normal climate change Cassandra — issued a warning during a teleconference call on global warming.
The melting ice caps, she said, appeared to be tied to recent extreme weather events, especially those occurring in the fall.
"It’s probably going to be a very interesting winter," she said.
She was off by just a few weeks.
Sandy destroyed lives, wrecked homes and savaged the landscape, but it may also have pushed climate change back into the political discourse. Although questions about global warming were never asked during the presidential debates and rarely mentioned on the campaign trail, Sandy’s timing, severity and longevity suddenly raised climate change’s public profile.
The day after Sandy struck, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said, "After what happened, what has been happening in the last few years, I don’t think anyone can sit back anymore and say ‘Well, I’m shocked at that weather pattern.’"
Two days after the storm, New York City’s mayor Michael Bloomberg endorsed President Obama primarily because he believed he’d do a better job addressing global warming than former governor Mitt Romney.
http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2012/11/experts_argue_global_warmings.html
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