Study: Climate change added $8 billion to Sandy's damages

[Omaha Steve]

Source: AP

By SETH BORENSTEIN

Climate change-triggered sea level rise added $8 billion in damage during 2012’s Superstorm Sandy, one of nation’s costliest weather disasters, a new study said.

During Sandy — a late fall freak combination of a hurricane and other storms that struck New York and surrounding areas — the seas were almost 4 inches (9.6 centimeters) higher because of human-caused climate change, according to a study in Tuesday’s journal Nature Communications. Researchers calculated that those few inches caused 13% of Sandy’s overall $62.5 billion damage, flooding 36,000 more homes. Sandy killed 147 people, 72 in the eastern United States, according to the National Hurricane Center.

While past studies have determined global warming was a factor in extreme weather events, either by increasing the chance of them happening or making them stronger, the new study is one of the first to tally the human costs of climate change from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas.

“In most cases, flooding was made worse by sea level rise and we show how much worse,” said study co-author Philip Orton, a physical oceanographer at the Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey.



FILE - In this Thursday, Jan. 31, 2013 file photo, a storm-damaged beachfront house is reflected in a pool of water in the Far Rockaways, in the Queens borough of New York. A study released in the journal Nature Communications on Tuesday, May 18, 2021, says climate change added $8 billion to the massive costs of 2012's Superstorm Sandy. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan, File)


Read more: https://apnews.com/article/climate-climate-change-science-environment-and-nature-a9df0907dd0c0a5fbe597468a3eebcec

[bucolic_frolic]

1. Climate change and property damage and insurance costs strike the fear in me

I doubt the raw materials exist to replace half of everything on the planet.