Open thread for night owls: Sandy and the big picture

A Siegel writes Ostrich Heads in the Sand(y)?

What we are seeing has been referred to as a 'climate on steroids'. Bicyclists have won the Tour de France without using steroids but Lance Armstrong won seven with ... Professional baseball players have wowed me with home runs without using steroids but flooded the stands with homers in the steroid era ...  Blizzards, wind storms, droughts, floods, hurricanes occurred throughout the millennia before humanity's impact on the climate became significant but records are tumbling as humanity continues to pack the climate system with a variety of 'steroids', especially greenhouse gases from fossil fuel use. Too few fundamentally understand the linkage between humanity's activities and increasing climate disruption. Too many people fail to understand how "unprecedented" after "record" after "unprecedented" weather event are within the predictions that have come from climate scientists, whose work to understand the impact of human activities on the climate lead us to an understanding that a warming planet will drive climate disruption. One reason:  meteorologists, weather forecasters, and TV weather reporters hesitancy to use the words "climate change" when discussing "unprecedented" weather events. [...] It doesn't take much to include truthful information about climate change in discussions of extreme weather events. While watching, with rapt concern about Sandy's potential impact on my community, The Weather Channel, a notable item: zero discussion of climate change amid the fleeting leaps from one weather-besieged reporter on a beach to another. The absence of comments like those of The Wall Street Journal's Holthaus leave watchers, at best, partially informed. To discuss weather events as "unprecedented" and "record-breaking" without connecting the dots to climate change's (pdf) influence on the situation does not represent truthful reporting. Thus, you should consider as untruthful those who discuss (especially those who have the opportunity for long analytical discussions explaining events) extreme weather events without raising how humanity's thumb on the scale through climate change.

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