It also resurrected the unwarranted claim that global warming was to blame for such events, together with the morally irresponsible argument that we should help future hurricane victims by cutting CO2 emissions.From Bill Clinton to Robert Redford, countless pundits blamed Sandy on climate change. Most spectacularly, the cover of Bloomberg Businessweek placed the monumental caption "IT'S GLOBAL WARMING, STUPID" over a picture of flooded Manhattan. Now, global warming is real, and cutting CO2 is a good idea when the reduction cost is lower than that of the damage it prevents. There is also a grain of truth in the connection between hurricanes and global warming: the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) expects stronger but fewer hurricanes toward the end of this century.
But the end of the century is 88 years from now, and blaming global warming now is simply unconvincing. In its 2012 report on extreme weather, the IPCC put little trust in any attribution of hurricanes to global warming.The authors of one of the central Science papers for the UN's hurricane estimates put it clearly: "It is premature to conclude that human activities ... have already had a detectable impact on Atlantic hurricane activity." We will be unable to detect an impact "until we near the end of the century."
