Then came Hurricane Sandy.

"Sandy's Climate Context," The Columbia Journalism Review

It should come as no surprise that as Hurricane Sandy spiraled up the eastern seaboard, a variety of media outlets sought to explain the so-called super storm’s relationship to climate change. A few did well, but generalizations about extreme weather continue to mar this type of coverage.

Take Rebecca Leber’s attempt to bash the press for ignoring climate change at Climate Progress. “Despite the hysteria surrounding Hurricane Sandy,” she wrote, “not one major newspaper has reported the scientifically established link that carbon pollution fuels more extreme weather.”

That assertion about an established link is misleading. In reality, climate change fuels some extreme weather in some places, and the links are not very well understood.

OCTOBER 31
"Just How Unprecedented Was Hurricane Sandy?" Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science Blog

While Sandy was both historic and disastrous for the Northeast, there was one other historic side of the story that is actually positive: the forecasts for the track of Sandy were spot-on.

"How Hurricane Sandy Slapped the Sarcasm Out of Twitter," The New York Times

In the early days of Twitter, there was a very big debate about whether reporters should break news on Twitter. That debate now seems quaint. Plenty of short-burst nuggets of news went out from reporters on Twitter on Monday night and they were quickly followed by more developed reports on-air or on the Web. There were abundant news posts from @antderosa of Reuters, @acarvin of NPR and @brianstelter of The New York Times, among many others, but there were also tweets from ordinary people relaying very important information about their blocks, their neighborhoods, their boroughs. I knew what was happening to many of my friends as far away as the District of Columbia and as close as the guy up the block. There is no more important news than that.

NOVEMBER 1
"Bloomberg Backs Obama, Citing Fallout From Storm," The New York Times

Mr. Bloomberg, a political independent in his third term leading New York City, has been sharply critical of Mr. Obama, a Democrat, and Mitt Romney, the president’s Republican rival, saying that both men had failed to candidly confront the problems afflicting the nation. But he said he had decided over the past several days that Mr. Obama was the better candidate to tackle the global climate change that he believes might have contributed to the violent storm, which took the lives of at least 38 New Yorkers and caused billions of dollars in damage.

“The devastation that Hurricane Sandy brought to New York City and much of the Northeast—in lost lives, lost homes and lost business—brought the stakes of next Tuesday’s presidential election into sharp relief,” Mr. Bloomberg wrote in an editorial for Bloomberg View.

“Our climate is changing,” he wrote. “And while the increase in extreme weather we have experienced in New York City and around the world may or may not be the result of it, the risk that it may be—given the devastation it is wreaking—should be enough to compel all elected leaders to take immediate action.”

"It's Global Warming, Stupid," Bloomberg Businessweek

Yes, yes, it’s unsophisticated to blame any given storm on climate change. Men and women in white lab coats tell us—and they’re right—that many factors contribute to each severe weather episode. Climate deniers exploit scientific complexity to avoid any discussion at all.

Clarity, however, is not beyond reach. Hurricane Sandy demands it: At least 40 U.S. deaths. Economic losses expected to climb as high as $50 billion. Eight million homes without power. Hundreds of thousands of people evacuated. More than 15,000 flights grounded. Factories, stores, and hospitals shut. Lower Manhattan dark, silent, and underwater.

"On Sandy and Humanity's 'Blah, Blah, Blah, Bang' Disaster Plans," Dot Earth

For millions of people in the New York metropolitan region and adjacent areas flooded, scorched, and pummeled by the extraordinary hybrid storm once known as Sandy, arguments about how much of the storm’s ferocity was human-created are secondary.

Arguments about how to discuss such extreme events in the context of climate policy—while important—are down the list, as well, even with a presidential election days away. After all, that debate is perennial. (Go here for a valuable 2009 discussion of this question in relation to climate change and African megadroughts; plug in hurricanes where you see drought and the pattern will feel familiar.)

While scientists and campaigners debate what mix of factors shaped this epic storm, what’s indisputable is that much of the disaster that unfolded as it came ashore was the result of human actions and decisions—ranging from where we’ve chosen to build or subsidize development to how seriously our governments take the need to build with the worst in mind (as always, of course, with budgets in mind).

This post is truncated by the troubles I’m having getting online in a blacked-out part of the Hudson Valley, but I want at least to start a discussion of the prime question of the moment: What are the political, economic, societal and personal traits that caused one of the world’s wealthiest and most sophisticated cities to end up (despite longstanding warnings) with flooded tunnels, subways and neighborhoods and widespread flood-triggered loss of electricity?

NOVEMBER 2
"Waiting for Someone to Call," Outside

In the post-Sandy recovery, these juxtapositions are truly alarming. Downtown Brooklyn is alive and happening; Coney Island, seven miles away, is a set from The Day After Tomorrow. North of Montauk Highway, which runs west-to-east on Long Island, it’s business as usual—bagel shops, blue skies, box stores—only with less gas, dark traffic lights, and more kids on the street, since schools are closed. South of Montauk, where numerous canals and inlets divvy the shore up into miniature peninsulas, trees lie on power lines, boats sit askew in yards, and the National Guard stands watch. On Wednesday, in many places, standing water still surrounded houses.

"In New York's Public Housing, Fear Creeps in With the Dark," The New York Times

Elsewhere in the building, Sandra Leon, 35, a mother of two, kept an eye on her door fearing another attempted break-in. Victor Alvarez, 60, waited for any word of his wife, Lucet, who suffers from schizophrenia and had disappeared into the wreckage-strewed neighborhood. And Marilyn Smalls, 48, sipped a room-temperature Corona that she had liberated from a gas-station trash bin the day before, along with sodas and bags of beef jerky—which drew neighbors knocking, as word of the haul got out.

Perhaps more so than in any other place in the city, the loss of power for people living in public housing projects forced a return to a primal existence. Opened fire hydrants became community wells. Sleep-and-wake cycles were timed to sunsets and sunrises. People huddled for warmth around lighted gas stoves as if they were roaring fires. Darkness became menacing, a thing to be feared.

"Sandy's Silent Killer: Carbon Monoxide Deaths Spring Up After the Storm," Star-Ledger

For all of Hurricane’s Sandy’s power and fury, it also spawned a silent killer that could become one of the storm’s deadliest legacies.

Carbon monoxide poisoning has claimed at least five lives in New Jersey since Monday, mostly from the fumes of gas- or diesel-powered generators.

NOVEMBER 3
"In the End, Marathon Didn't Feel Right," CNN

On her way to pick up her New York City Marathon bib number Friday, longtime New Yorker Lauren Mandel was having second thoughts of running in the iconic race.

Just four days after Superstorm Sandy hit her city, she was wracked by a knot in her stomach as she got closer to the convention center serving as the hub for race participants.

"Walking past ... generators heating up tents for people to eat pasta tomorrow night when there are people who haven't eaten a hot meal in five days" left her with the feeling: "This is so inappropriate and this is so wrong," she said.

"A State-By-State Look at Superstorm's Effects," The Associated Press

"Disruption From Storm May Be Felt at Polls," The New York Times

Some New Jersey voters may find their hurricane-damaged polling sites replaced by military trucks, with—in the words of the state’s lieutenant governor, Kim Guadagno—“a well-situated national guardsman and a big sign saying, ‘Vote Here.’” Half of the polling sites in Nassau County on Long Island still lacked power on Friday. And New York City was planning to build temporary polling sites in tents in some of its worst-hit neighborhoods.

—Joe Spring
@joespring
facebook.com/joespring.1