Tom Zeller Jr.: Hurricane Sandy's Link To Climate Change: Does It Matter?

Kevin Trenberth, a senior scientist with the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., suggests, for example, that mankind's culpability in adding furor to a storm like Sandy might amount to perhaps 5 or 10 percent.
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"Whether or not there was a climate change component to this storm, it teaches us a lot of things, including how behind the 8-ball we are in being able to handle big events of the type that we believe -- that scientists think -- are going to get more frequent and intense in the future," Oppenheimer said. "So whether this one was 5 percent due to climate change or 1 percent or 10 percent -- it's interesting, it matters to a certain extent, but it's not the whole story by any means."
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Michael Mann suggested that there was a moral bankruptcy to this thinking. "Here is the critical point," he said. "We have gained relative to the developing world through two centuries of access to cheap fossil fuel energy. What sort of moral authority do we have in negotiations aimed at convincing them to reduce their own emissions, if we show no willingness to do the same after having had a two century head-start in building a fossil fuel based economy?"

Will Sandy Change the Climate Change Conversation? | LiveScience

The message that climate change did play a role in Hurricane Sandy isn't getting the attention it should, Mann said.

"The climate change discussion needs a tipping point — I call it a Cuyahoga River moment," Mann said, referring to the polluted Ohio river that caught fire in 1969 and sparked an environmental movement. [Reality of Climate Change: 10 Myths Busted]

Foley agreed. "We're having the same conversation we've been having since the 1988 drought, the 1993 floods, Hurricane Katrina, the heat waves in Europe. Public attention seems to max out at a couple weeks."

Big retailers ‘must boost sales by £1bn to counter carbon tax’ | Energy Live News

Big British retailers will be forced to find a total £1billion worth of extra sales to counter the newly introduced carbon tax.