OK, no one can predict a specific weather event months in advance. But what we can do is anticipate expected frequency of events. Back in February of this year, Nature Climate Change published a paper, Physically based assessment of hurricane surge threat under climate change, (PDF bypasses Nature's paywall) that predicted more frequent storm surges for New York City thanks to the changing climate.
Here's the abstract:
Storm surges are responsible for much of the damage and loss of life associated with landfalling hurricanes. Understanding how global warming will affect hurricane surges thus holds great interest. As general circulation models (GCMs) cannot simulate hurricane surges directly, we couple a GCM-driven hurricane model with hydrodynamic models to simulate large numbers of synthetic surge events under projected climates and assess surge threat, as an example, for New York City (NYC). Struck by many intense hurricanes in recorded history and prehistory, NYC is highly vulnerable to storm surges. We show that the change of storm climatology will probably increase the surge risk for NYC; results based on two GCMs show the distribution of surge levels shifting to higher values by a magnitude comparable to the projected sea-level rise (SLR). The combined effects of storm climatology change and a 1 m SLR may cause the present NYC 100-yr surge flooding to occur every 3–20 yr and the present 500-yr flooding to occur every 25–240 yr by the end of the century.
Think about that. Storms that used to occur every 100 years can be expected between 5 and 33 times as often.
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In what may go down as the high water mark of climate denial dementia Watts Up With That? has already begun denying that Sandy was a hurricane,
Actyally back in 2005 an event like Sandy was the #2 or #3 most damaging event predicted due to weather in the US. So not exactly news. Perhaps NYC needs to rebuild the elevated railroads and ditch the subways.
lyle - does the phrase "more frequent storm surges....due to climate change" have no meaning to you?
I am really struggling to understand how some have managed to deny the existence of an effect they recognized as 4 year olds after they had to enter a car their parents parked in the sun.
due to weather in the US. So not exactly news. Perhaps NYC needs to rebuild the elevated railroads and ditch the subways.
It's like smoking - it doesn't cause cancer; it dramatically increases your chances of getting cancer.
It also makes any cancer you do get worse (either by giving you two, or reducing your ability to cope), or makes other things happen which aren;t good, but not cancer (shortness of breath, ill health, no taste buds or sense of smell, asthma, etc).