Conventional wisdom about climate change may have begun to gel
in the aftermath of Sandy, but did global warming really cause
the vicious hybrid storm that devastated much of the eastern
seaboard last week? The short answer is no. Attributing Sandy or
any other single event to long-term climate trends is rather
like blaming El Niño for a car accident on the Santa Monica
Freeway. But that's hardly an excuse for policymakers to keep
kicking the climate can down the road. Science actually doesn't
tell us much about that kind of causality, so it's time to stop
acting like it does. At its best, climate science deals in
probabilities. This means that under ideal conditions,
scientists can estimate how a given climate signal alters the
chances of a particular event. For example, we can now begin to
estimate how global warming changes the probability of
destructive hurricane landfalls. But in the case of hybrid
storms like Sandy, which combine hurricane and winter storm
characteristics, science hasn't even progressed