"Martin Hoerling, who chairs the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA’s) climate variability research program, and who oversees NOAA’s Climate Scene Investigators, observed, “neither the frequency of tropical or extratropical cyclones over the North Atlantic are projected to appreciably change due to climate change, nor have there been indications of a change in their statistical behavior over this region in recent decades."
"Scientists, moreover, report a striking decline in hurricane activity during recent years. National Hurricane Center data show a dramatic decline in major hurricanes striking the United States during the past half century. As the earth gradually recovers from the 1300-1900 Little Ice Age, the frequency of major hurricane strikes is declining rather than increasing."
"Great events can have little causes,” he told the New York Times.
“In this case, the immediate cause is most likely little more that the
coincidental alignment of a tropical storm with an extratropical storm.”
Indeed, rather than fueling the storm, Hoerling stressed that climate change has little to no effect upon hurricanes.
“Neither the frequency of tropical or extratropical cyclones over the
North Atlantic are projected to appreciably change due to climate
change, nor have there been indications of a change in their statistical
behavior over this region in recent decades,”
Andrew Weaver, a climate scientist with Canada’s University of
Victoria, agreed that climate change didn't make an ordinary storm
extraordinary.
"The ingredients of this storm seem a little bit cooked by climate
change, but the overall storm is difficult to attribute to global
warming," Weaver told the Associated Press.
To further complicate matters, climate scientists and hurricane
experts largely conclude that as the climate warms, there will be fewer
hurricanes overall, although those that hit will be stronger and wetter,
according to the Associated Press
Unless two storms hit the exact same place, two storms will always cause more damage than one big one.
Hoerling told Andrew Revkin of the NY Times: In this case, the immediate cause is most likely little more that the coincidental alignment of a tropical storm with an extratropical storm. Both frequent the west Atlantic in October…nothing unusual with that. On rare occasions their timing is such as to result in an interaction which can lead to an extreme event...
MIT hurricane researcher Kerry Emanuel, in a commentary in Foreign Policy, stated trying to establish a causal connection between Sandy and climate change is essentially hopeless.
“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,” Emanuel said.
Science blogger David Appell adds: ...blaming everything on climate change is as misleading as ignoring or denying it completely. More importantly, it’s ineffective, not least because it ruins your credibility.
Houston Chronicle science blogger Eric Berger may have said it best: ...telling people that Sandy was caused by climate change, or that Sandy is the “new normal” as a result of global warming, or that Sandy is “global warming, stupid,” is, well, stupid. The science does not support any of these positions.
Texas Tech atmospheric science professor Katherine Hayhoe told NPR how elevated ocean temperatures in the Atlantic might have given Sandy some extra fuel:
“Off the coast where Sandy struck..., October surface ocean temperatures have warmed by two degrees over the last hundred years,” Hayhoe says. “So when any given hurricane comes along, on average there’s warmer water than there would have been otherwise,” she notes. “Which gives it more energy, and gives it more strength.”
Hayhoe stopped short of saying how much global warming intensified Sandy except to say “it’s more than zero”.
Did global warming contribute to it? Sure? The global warming that's been going on since the last ace age has always been there, but it didn't cause it. That's fallacious thinking meant to sell headlines and ad impressions.
--
According to a consensus statement from leading hurricane and climate change researchers published in 2010, scientists have been unable to definitively detect a human contribution in hurricane activity. NOAA hurricane and climate change researcher Tom Knutson - who contributed to the statement - put it this way:
It is premature to conclude that human activities--and particularly greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming--have already had a detectable impact on Atlantic hurricane activity. That said, human activities may have already caused changes that are not yet detectable due to the small magnitude of the changes or observational limitations, or are not yet properly modeled
http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v3/n3/abs/ngeo779.html
regarding the 1.2 inch sea rise in nyc since 1900 - So of the total 17.34 feet of water (above the station datum) recorded at The Battery tide gauge during the height of Sandy, about 0.5 feet of that could probably be linked to anthropogenic global warming. This is not nothing, but the overwhelming majority of the damage done by the storm surge would have happened anyway.
as carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations have risen, the frequency of hurricanes making landfall in the U.S. has declined.
The US Has Had 285 Hurricane Strikes Since 1850: ‘The U.S. has always been vulnerable to hurricanes. 86% of U.S. hurricane strikes occurred with CO2 below [NASA scientist James] Hansen’s safe level of 350 PPM.’
If there’s anything in this data at all, it looks like CO2 is preventing more US landfalling hurricanes.
Data Source: NOAA;
Wikipedia has a List of New York Hurricanes going back to the 17th century. The strongest was the New England Hurricane of 1938, a category 3 storm that killed upwards of 600 people.
Sandy was a category 1 hurricane before making landfall in the Northeast, which means many landfalling hurricanes, including some previous storms striking New York, had much higher wind speeds. What made Sandy a “superstorm” was the hurricane’s merging with a strong winter storm. MIT climatologist Kerry Emanuel calls Sandy a “hybrid” storm:
Hurricanes and winter storms are powered by completely different energy sources. The hurricane is powered by the evaporation of sea water. Winter storms are powered by horizontal temperature contrasts in the atmosphere. So hybrid storms are able to tap into both energy sources. That’s why they can be so powerful.
NASA scientist Roy Spencer provides a similar explanation:
It is basically the “perfect storm” scenario of the chance timing of a tropical cyclone merging with an extra-tropical winter-type storm. Without Hurricane Sandy off the coast, the strong trough over the eastern U.S. (caused by cold Canadian air plunging southward) would have still led to a nor’easter type storm forming somewhere along the east coast of the U.S. But since Hurricane Sandy just happens to be in the right place at the right time to merge with that cyclone, we are getting a “superstorm”.
This merger of systems makes the whole cyclone larger in geographical extent than it normally would be. And this is what will make the surface pressures so low at the center of the storm.
To put things into even starker perspective, consider that from August 1954 through August 1955, the East Coast saw three different storms make landfall — Carol, Hazel and Diane — that in 2012 each would have caused about twice as much damage as Sandy.
