But don't mistakenly separate the Hurricane Sandy that hit our
coast from climate change. We don't make that distinction
between cigarettes and cancer, between obesity and heart
attacks, between lead and developmental delay. What climate
change does is make many "natural" events more frequent and
worse. By continuing to pump millions of tons of carbon
pollution into our atmosphere every single day, we are throwing
Earth's complex climate system out of whack and this is the
price we pay. Science tells us that the destructiveness of this
storm was fueled by climate change -- driving higher sea levels
that pushed up storm surge, and higher ocean temperatures that
contributed to the monstrous size of the storm and loaded extra
rain into the clouds. Science has identified another powerful
potential factor: The record-breaking melting of Arctic sea
ice's impact on the jet stream may have created the block of
high pressure above Greenland that drove Sandy west into the
continental U.S., rather than allowing it to sp