If you have a sense that this business of hurricanes becoming routine in October is new and that we didn’t use to have to worry about such storms with names starting with S, T and higher in the alphabet so much in the past then you are correct.

As Hurricane Sandy (no relation to CLF’s ace Vermont Senior Attorney Sandy Levine) moves up the coast it is worth noting that some of the sharpest observers of our climate and weather, like the founder of weather website Weather Underground the redoubtable Dr. Jeff Masters, are seeing a very real relationship between our changing climate and the advent of these “perfect storms” that bring tropical and winter weather into a fiendish collaboration.  As Dr. Masters writes (note sentence I have underlined in particular):

The Northeast U.S. scenario

If Sandy makes landfall farther to the north near Maine and Nova Scotia, heavy rains will be the main threat, since the cold waters will weaken the storm significantly before landfall. The trees have fewer leaves farther to the north, which will reduce the amount of tree damage and power failures compared to a more southerly track. However, given that ocean temperatures along the Northeast U.S. coast are about 5°F above average, there will be an unusually large amount of water vapor available to make heavy rain. If the trough of low pressure approaching the East Coast taps into the large reservoir of cold air over Canada and pulls down a significant amount of Arctic air, the potential exists for the unusually moist air from Sandy to collide with this cold air from Canada and unleash the heaviest October rains ever recorded in the Northeast U.S., Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick. This Northeast U.S. scenario would probably cause damages near $100 million dollars.

 The story is clear and frightening.  Warmer water (a clear part of the story of global warming) is keeping these tropical storms alive later and later in the year and putting water into the atmosphere that then pours down on us in these storms.

And you were wondering why we were so intent on taking the steps needed to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions causing global warming? The answer is very clear: self-preservation.

A satellite image of the Oct. 26 storm.

Dr. Jeff Masters, the co-founder of the Weather Underground website is the voice of climate sanity in the meteorologist world.    He has consistently noted, as he did in this post from last March,  how the models used by climate scientists make predictions about how winter storms are going to change in a warming world that are deeply consistent with what we are seeing unfold before us:

General Circulation Models (GCMs) like the ones used in the 2007 IPCC Assessment Report do a very good job simulating how winter storms behave in the current climate, and we can run simulations of the atmosphere with extra greenhouse gases to see how winter storms will behave in the future. The results are very interesting. Global warming is expected to warm the poles more than the equatorial regions. This reduces the difference in temperature between the pole and Equator. Since winter storms form in response to the atmosphere’s need to transport heat from the Equator to the poles, this reduced temperature difference reduces the need for winter storms, and thus the models predict fewer storms will form. However, since a warmer world increases the amount of evaporation from the surface and puts more moisture in the air, these future storms drop more precipitation. During the process of creating that precipitation, the water vapor in the storm must condense into liquid or frozen water, liberating “latent heat”–the extra heat that was originally added to the water vapor to evaporate it in the first place. This latent heat intensifies the winter storm, lowering the central pressure and making the winds increase. So, the modeling studies predict a future with fewer total winter storms, but a greater number of intense storms. These intense storms will have more lift, and will thus tend to drop more precipitation–including snow, when we get areas of strong lift in the -15°C preferred snowflake formation region.

Masters referenced these observations in a recent post about the unprecedented storm (which some are calling a “landicane“) that ripped across the Continental United States.  As Masters notes:

We’ve now had two remarkable extratropical storms this year in the U.S. that have smashed all-time low pressure records across a large portion of the country. Is this a sign that these type of storms may be getting stronger? Well, there is evidence that wintertime extratropical storms have grown in intensity in the Pacific, Arctic, and Great Lakes in recent decades.

And as always, Masters is tracking storms in the parts of the world more accustomed to this kind of activity.  However, he notes that it is “unprecedented” to have a hurricane of the magnitude of Tomas appear this late in the season.

The climate is changing.  The effects are real.  The need for action is urgent – and  the zombie armies of climate denial are approaching.