Was Hurricane Sandy caused by climate change? Climate changing?
"Anyone who thinks there isn't a change in weather patterns is
denying reality," says Andrew Cuomo, governor of New York state,
which bore the brunt of the superstorm. Many climate scientists
would agree with Cuomo when it comes to identifying the cause of
the record-breaking droughts and floods of recent years. But
when it comes to tropical storms, the experts also say they
cannot give a black-or-white answer for one of the most complex
issues in meteorology. Tropical storms are fuelled by warm seas,
so intuition says that as ocean temperatures rise - known as
cyclones, typhoons and hurricanes - should become more frequent
and more brutal. But a clear rise in Earth's surface temperature
since the 1970s has so far failed to engender a similar increase
in tropical cyclone numbers, which have remained stable at about
90 per year. In the Atlantic alone, however, the US National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) says major storms
have bec