Climate Change Cost New York $8 Billion During Hurricane Sandy
A new study is the first to put a dollar figure on the effect of global warming in the 2012 superstorm.
Photographer: Victor J. Blue/Bloomberg
When Hurricane Sandy slammed the East Coast in 2012, the storm sent an extra 9 feet of water over and above New York harbor’s high tide gauges, flooding tunnels and streets, causing widespread power outages, and leaving in its wake economic damage of roughly $60 billion. A new study has combined flood-damage modeling with climate models to find that $8 billion of those damages are the fault of human-caused sea level rise.
Scientists have become increasingly adept over the last decade at teasing out the influence of climate change on both the likelihood and the severity of specific weather events. The authors of this latest paper, published Tuesday in the journal Climate Communications, said their analysis is the first to measure the cost differential between a climate changed world and not.