Meghan McCain to GOP after Sandy: Do you still doubt climate change? 
 
 By Ben Geman - 
 
 Political analyst Meghan McCain, daughter of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), is challenging widespread GOP skepticism about climate change in the wake of Hurricane Sandy. 
 
 “So are we still going to go with climate change not being real fellow republicans [sic]?” McCain wrote, via Twitter, around midnight as the storm was slamming ashore. 
 
 
 
 McCain’s father has advocated for curbing greenhouse gas emissions and co-sponsored cap-and-trade bills several years ago. 
 
 However, substantial numbers of Republicans now dispute widely held scientific views about global warming and the extent of humans’ contribution. 
 
 
 
 
 
 As Sandy menaced the East Coast, some climate activists and scientists used the storm to point out links between climate change and extreme weather.Scientists urge caution about attributing specific weather events to climate change. But experts warn that warmer ocean waters, greater atmospheric moisture and other factors are fueling the intensity of storms, and that rising sea levels will make coastal impacts worse.A number of science writers in recent days have pointed to research on Atlantic cyclones published recently in theby the University of Copenhagen’s Aslak Grinsted.He concludes that warm years are more active, the largest cyclones are most affected by warmer conditions and that there’s a “statistically significant trend in the frequency of large surge events” over the last 90 years.closely examines the climate change-storm nexus here , while NPR explores it here 
 
 Both outlets look at a 2012 study by the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change on extreme weather and climate change. 
 
 That study finds that researchers currently have “low confidence” in tying cyclone activity in recent decades to climate change. 
 
 They’re more confident in links between climate change and heatwaves, record temperatures and heavy precipitation over the past half-century. 
 
 ||||| Science 
 
 Frankenstorm: Has Climate Change Created A Monster? 
 
 It was not a good year for people, weather and climate. The winter was strangely warm in many places and the summer ridiculously hot. As a large fraction of the country suffered through extreme or even extraordinary drought many folks naturally wondered, "Is this climate change?" Then along came a presidential election in which the words "climate change" disappeared from the dialogue. Now, just a week or so before voting day, the convergence of westbound Hurricane Sandy with a eastbound cold front is creating a massive storm, a Frankenstorm even, that is threatening millions of Americans. Weird weather is making yet another appearance in our lives and once again we ask, "Is this climate change?" 
 
 The hyper-charged political landscape we are crossing now creates its own sparks when trying to answer that question. In a world looking for "wake-up calls" and "smoking guns," how do scientists address the thorny issue of attribution? Did anthropogenic climate change cause the storm that rained out your picnic yesterday? Is it causing the terrifying storm crawling up the East Coast now? There are deep, powerful and potent issues here that touch on both science and the relationship between science and politics. 
 
 Let's start with the science. 
 
 For years, most climate scientists would say it's impossible to link an individual weather event with climate change. That, in fact, is the difference between weather and climate. Climate is all about long-term trends — not the 5-day forecast. 
 
 Recently, however, some researchers have taken the issue of attribution seriously. Using a variety of techniques, they are attempting to quantify the role human-driven climate change plays in particular events. This is science at the bleeding edge, where framing their questions correctly so that they might lead to meaningful answers is still a hot issue. 
 
 Researchers like Randall Dole of NOAA, for example, might ask what percentage of an extreme event's magnitude came from a changing climate. Peter Stott of the UK Met Office frames the question differently. He looks at the odds for a given extreme weather event to occur given human-driven climate change. Kevin Trenberth of NCAR takes a third view, asking: Given a changed background climate, how should we expect weather to change? 
 
 All of these different perspectives (sometimes framed as "Weather on Steroids") have led to new quantitative explorations of climate change's role in what is happening now, not 30 years in the future. In an early example of attribution science Peter Stott and colleagues took on the extraordinary heat waves that struck Europe in 2003 (killing thousands). Their conclusion? 
 
 "...we estimate it is very likely (confidence level >90%) that human influence has at least doubled the risk of a heat wave exceeding this threshold magnitude." 
 
 This kind of science has allowed researchers to get a much better handle on attributing climate change as a game changer for events like this summer's killer heat and drought. 
 
 So how about the Frankenstorm? 
 
 Here the waters get muddied. There is a hierarchy of weather events which scientists feel they understand well enough for establishing climate change links. Global temperature rises and extreme heat rank high on that list, but Hurricanes rank low. As the IPCC special report on extreme events put it "There is low confidence in any observed long-term (i.e., 40 years or more) increases in tropical cyclone activity (i.e., intensity, frequency, duration), after accounting for past changes in observing capabilities." 
 
 The reasons for "low confidence" are manifold. Some part of the caution comes from the complexity of the problem, and some part comes from the lack of good data before the satellite era (about 1970). Thus, many climate scientists will not want to go out on a limb for hurricanes. They just don't have the tools to make strong inferences. 
 
 This is not to say progress isn't being made. One thing that does seem clear is that warmer oceans (a la global warming) mean more evaporation, and that likely leads to storms with more and more dangerous rainfall of the kind we saw with Hurricane Irene last year. In addition, a paper published just last month, used records of storm surges going back to 1923 as a measure of hurricane activity. A strong correlation between warm years and strong hurricanes was seen. Thus if you warm the planet, you can expect more dangerous storms. 
 
 Which brings us to our bottom line. The science of climate attribution is very exciting and full of cool, new ideas. It has already provided us with first steps towards more precision in understanding how climate change is changing climate now, already. For hurricanes, however, sticking to the science means it is still hard to point to an individual storm and say, yes! Climate change! A more reasoned approach is to take the full weight of our understanding about the Earth and its systems and go beyond asking if any particular event is due to global warming or natural variability. As Kevin Ternbeth of NCAR says "Nowadays, there's always an element of both." 
 
 Finally there is the issue of science and politics. Tania Lombrozo wrote a beautiful piece here on Thursday asking if "Scientists Should Promote Results Over Process." Speaking directly to climate change, she concludes 
 
 "Overstating confidence in scientific claims may ... miss a long-term benefit for a short-term advantage: rhetorical oomph comes at the cost of an opportunity to educate people about how science works and why the products of science are our most reliable guides to the natural world." 
 
 I could not have said it better myself. 
 
 You can keep up with more of what Adam Frank is thinking on Facebook and on Twitter: @AdamFrank4 ||||| Every time a major natural disaster barrels along, people want to know whether it has anything to do with global warming. Is climate change causing this storm? That drought? Will we see more disasters like it if the planet keeps warming? 
 
 
 
 (The Washington Post) 
 
 When it comes to tropical cyclones like Hurricane Sandy, the climate links can be fairly difficult to pin down. On the one hand, humans have warmed the planet about 0.8°C since the Industrial Revolution. As Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research likes to say, that affects all weather events to an extent. The oceans are now warmer, there's more moisture in the air—those things help fuel hurricanes and alter other weather patterns. 
 
 And yet trying to attribute specific hurricanes to changes in global temperature remains quite difficult. In its big report on natural disasters last year, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said it had "low confidence" that humans were currently affecting tropical cyclone patterns. Hurricanes are far more complicated to study than, say, heat waves and the historical record is patchier. (For more on this, Andrew Revkin has an excellent discussion with climatologists over at Dot Earth.) 
 
 Looking ahead, meanwhile, scientists can say a bit more about future hurricanes—though only a bit more. The IPCC report noted that it was "likely" that tropical cyclones in some areas would get stronger, with faster winds and heavier rainfall, as the world warmed. The overall number of hurricanes, however, would most likely "either decrease or remain essentially unchanged." 
 
 But simply stopping there isn't quite right either. The chaos caused by Hurricane Sandy does highlight at least one other major reason to worry about climate change: rising sea levels. Note that storm is expected to be so devastating to places such as New York City in part because it's coming at high tide. Here's Michael Lemonick: 
 
 This nightmare scenario — for New York and the rest of the northeast — is especially likely because Sandy’s storm surge is peaking through three high tides, which magnifies its effect. At the moment, high tide itself is higher than normal because we’re right at the full moon, when tidal effects are at a maximum. As a result, according to National Weather Service projections and an analysis by Climate Central, it is likely that The Battery in Lower Manhattan, Sandy Hook, N.J., and Atlantic City will see the highest storm tides on record during Monday evening’s high tide. Those records go back to 1893, 1932, and 1911, respectively. 
 
 
 
 Probability of storm surges greater than six feet around New York City. Source: NOAA 
 
 While storm surges are affected by a variety of factors, higher sea levels can help magnify those surges and exacerbate flooding — not just during freakishly large storms like Sandy, but during smaller storms too. 
 
 Humans, of course, aren't responsible for the tides. But we are warming the planet right now, causing glaciers and ice caps to melt and sea levels to rise. In the mid-Atlantic region, the coastal seas have risen about eight inches since 1900--and about a foot in New York Harbor. "That means," notes Lemonick, "the storm tides from Sandy are that much higher than they would have been if the identical storm had come along back then." 
 
 What's more, sea-level rise is expected to accelerate in the decades ahead—an additional two to seven feet by 2100, some scientists project. The IPCC concludes that it is "very likely" that extreme coastal flooding during storms will become far more common in the future as a result. And that's a big problem for cities such as New York, as Mireya Navarro wrote in a prescient piece for the New York Times last month: 
 
 Unlike New Orleans, New York City is above sea level. Yet the city is second only to New Orleans in the number of people living less than four feet above high tide — nearly 200,000 New Yorkers ... With higher seas, a common storm could prove as damaging as the rare big storm or hurricane is today, scientists say. Were sea levels to rise four feet by the 2080s, for example, 34 percent of the city’s streets could lie in the flood-risk zone, compared with just 11 percent now, a 2011 study commissioned by the state said. 
 
 You can see how a combination of rising sea levels, tides, and storms could affect different parts of the United States with this helpful GIS mapping tool from Climate Central. For New York City, the map shows just a small chance of a major six-foot surge by 2020—it takes a rare storm like Sandy and high tides to pull it off. But as the world warms and sea levels rise, the odds of a big storm surge increase. Suddenly, that freak event won't be so rare anymore. 
 
 The endless debates about whether this or that particular hurricane can be blamed on global warming are fascinating. But they can also distract from the more basic fact that our cities and infrastructure are quite vulnerable to future temperature increases and sea-level rise. And Hurricane Sandy, unfortunately, is a grim reminder of that. 
 
 Further reading: 
 
 --Which cities will get hit hardest by rising sea levels? 
 
 --How the United States is preparing for sea-level rise. For the most part, we aren't. In some places, we're making things worse. 
 
 --Arctic sea ice hit a record low this summer. Here's why it matters.
– The devastation wrought by Hurricane Sandy has plenty of people asking: Did climate change do this? New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo seemed to hint as much in his speech today, saying there was a "new reality" in weather patterns. "We have a 100-year flood every two years now," he noted, according to Politico. Meghan McCain was more blunt: "So are we still going to go with climate change not being real fellow Republicans?" she asked in a Tweet spotted by the Hill. But the actual science isn't yet definitive. Scientists have just begun figuring out how to link climate change to individual weather events, and thanks to a lack of data from the pre-satellite era, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says it has a "low confidence" when it comes to hurricanes, NPR explains. Research is emerging, however—one report last month showed that higher temperatures correlated strongly to stronger storms. And Brad Plumer at the Washington Post points out that scientists definitely agree that sea levels are rising, making our cities more vulnerable to flooding. "Hurricane Sandy is, unfortunately, a grim reminder of that."