Climate change, or crap shoot? Experts weigh Sandy's causes

Nov. 1, 2012 (Reuters) — A huge storm barrels down on the United States, wreaking havoc with punishing winds, record flooding, heavy snowfall and massive blackouts. Is the main culprit climate change or a freak set of coincidences? "It's a hybrid storm, which combines some features of tropical hurricanes with some features of winter storms, that operate on quite different mechanisms," said Kerry Emanuel, a professor of Atmospheric Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology."Sea level rise makes storm surges worse and will continue to do so in the future," said Stefan Rahmstorf, professor of physics of the oceans at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Potsdam, Germany. World sea levels have risen by 20 centimeters (8 inches) in the past 100 years, a trend blamed on melting ice and expanding water in the oceans caused by rising temperatures. "Every centimeter adds to damage," Rahmstorf said. "There are clearly changes in the environment that all of these storms are occurring in," he said. As for Sandy, however, a lot of the weather conditions that lined up were due to a "crap shoot." A hybrid storm can be an explosive storm, "what we might call a meteorological bomb," without the influence of climate change. read more at link above...