I wasn’t going to comment on Sandy and its depredations along the coast but after seeing article after article (or perhaps the exact same article hawked at many places, I never actually read any of it) babbling about how Sandy was all about global warming (stupid!) I felt compelled to toss my few cents into the mix. One of the main reasons that there was such extensive flooding in Manhattan was because of the power outage due to the lost of a major transformer. Had the power stayed on the pumps would have stayed on and the water would have been removed purt near as fast as it flowed in. It is no different than the sump pump in your basement, the power goes off during a rain storm and you wind up with a lake in your basement. There really isn’t anything amazing about it; when you dig a hole in the ground below the water table you are obligated to run pumps 24/7 _forever_ to keep it dry. You can’t make the hole water proof or what you get instead is a boat and it will pop right out of the ground!
Hurricanes don’t often run right up the east coast, generally they dog-leg to the east into the Atlantic or they come ashore further south and fizzle out into a more mundane storm (hurricanes _require_ large, very warm bodies of water to sustain their winds and rains). Had we had the same sort of weird weather regularly in the past (meaning a stalled cold front in the north-central part of the country and a “nor’easter” pushing in from the mid Atlantic) then we would have regularly had hurricanes run up the coast and would be rather bored by all the flooding (why is it that no one babbles about the exact same sort of problems in Miami?). The flooding was exacerbated by the monthly timing with the moon’s orbit (another thing that is _totally_ independent of any ‘global warming’) with extra high tides swelling the expected storm surge (the center of a hurricane is of low pressure which causes the ocean to ‘hump up’ underneath, sometimes as much as 10-15 feet above normal sea level). Again, nothing special to make note of.
And, of course, it is a tragedy that 80 houses burned down in Queens, but that also has diddly to do with ‘global warming’ and all to do with the same sorts of electricity problems that lead to pumps not working.
So, all this blather about the ‘storm of the century’ that was ’caused’ by ‘global warming’ is nonsense on the highest level. ‘Normal’ weather is highly variable and there is a _huge_ amount of reporting bias in historical weather information (see the link below), so making these absurd comments with certainty that our current weather ‘angst’ is in anyway related to long-term changes in weather patterns does nothing more than highlight the stupidity of the reporter.
As I posted earlier, hurricanes really haven’t got any stronger over the last century, there is a huge bias in reporting and a rather idiotic insistence in measuring the ‘strength’ of a hurricane by its damage, something that is totally irrelevant to the actually wind speeds or rain measurements.
Actually, the pumps can’t deal with a prolonged heavy rain, much less severe inundation. I totally agree that the severity was exacerbated by a number of events combining in a relatively rare way. It’s the nature of design failure. Whether or not the events are independent variations, I don’t know.
I also totally agree that the media have one goal: sell their product. Since every story has two or more sides, pick the view that sells. It would be negligence on their part to not report the facts so that preparations can be made where preparations are needed. Blowing things all out of proportion so that people hundreds of miles away run out and buy the stores empty is silly and a disservice to the public.
As you said, the biggest issue is that people overreact this time, then fail to react next time. Days earlier the track of the storm had it coming ashore right through the Chesapeake Bay and across DC. At that time the hysteric pronouncements were valid, except they were made days early. As the storm got closer it became clear it was going to hit North of the DC Metro area, but now everyone was in a tizzy, schools were closed, government shut down, etc. Some sporadic power losses and localized flooding, nothing different from any other tropical storm, yet everyone here thinks it was a hurricane, so now have unrealistic expectations of what kind of damage a direct hit would produce.