Climate Change Didn’t Cause Hurricane Sandy, But it Sure Made it Worse

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There are a bunch of technical reasons why climate change made Hurricane Sandy worse than it would have been, but Chris Mooney reports today that there’s also a very simple reason: global warming has raised sea levels by about eight inches over the past century, and this means that when Sandy swept ashore it had eight extra inches of water to throw at us.

It turns out, eight inches matters a lot. First of all, using Climate Central’s Surging Seas tool, [meteorologist Scott] Mandia estimated that 6,000 more people were impacted for each additional inch of sea level rise….Moreover, there is also reason to think that the second inch, so to speak, is worse than the first one. That’s because of basic physics. Water flowing atop a surface—say, a New York City street—has its energy sapped by the friction of dragging along that street. However, if the water level is higher, it’ll flow faster, because the water higher above the surface experiences less friction. “If you had an inch of water running down the street, you’d see all kinds of turbulence in it, which is basically energy being lost,” Strauss explains. “But if the water were a foot above it, you’d see more sheet-like movement, which is a more powerful motion.”

Speed matters a great deal in the context of a storm surge, because the surge is only temporary and will recede. So how far it penetrates before doing so is partly a function of its speed.

And there are still more reasons to think that increasing the size of a storm surge by eight inches really matters. Consider the US Army Corps of Engineers’ “depth-damage” functions, which the Corps uses to study how much flood damage grows with an increasing water level. The upshot here, says Mandia, is that “the damage is exponential, it’s not linear.”Or in other words, as the water level increases, the level of damage tends to rise much more steeply than the mere level of water itself.

So that’s that. No shilly shallying. No caveats. “There is 100 percent certainty that sea level rise made this worse,” says sea level expert Ben Strauss. “Period.”

And by the way, this is also why climate change is so much worse for a place like Bangladesh than it is for us: they have an enormous amount of very low-lying territory. They can adapt to a small, slow rise in sea level during normal times, but they can’t adapt to the fact that monsoons become exponentially worse when sea level is higher. That extra eight inches turns into millions of tons of extra water, all delivered within a few hours to a place with nowhere near the infrastructure to handle it. So when you think about sea level rise, don’t think about the shoreline advancing a bit and forcing people to move slightly farther inland. Think instead of storms and the extra millions of tons of water it delivers. That’s climate change, and that’s about as concrete as it gets.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

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