Gore is a high-profile advocate of measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. | AP Photo
By ANDREW RESTUCCIA (Politico.com)
Former vice president-turned-climate-change-activist Al Gore warned Tuesday that the storm that ravaged the East Coast Monday is “a disturbing sign of things to come.”
“We must heed this warning and act quickly to solve the climate crisis. Dirty energy makes dirty weather,” Gore said in a statement posted on his blog Tuesday afternoon.
Gore, one of the country’s most high-profile advocates of measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, compared this week’s massive storm to 2010 floods that devastated Nashville, Tenn.
“For me, the Nashville flood was a milestone,” he said. “For many, Hurricane Sandy may prove to be a similar event: a time when the climate crisis — which is often sequestered to the far reaches of our everyday awareness became a reality.”
Both natural disasters, Gore said, “were strengthened by the climate crisis.”
“Scientists tell us that by continually dumping 90 million tons of global warming pollution into the atmosphere every single day, we are altering the environment in which all storms develop. As the oceans and atmosphere continue to warm, storms are becoming more energetic and powerful. Hurricane Sandy, and the Nashville flood, were reminders of just that,” he said.
Activists have criticized President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney for rarely mentioning climate change on the campaign trail. But, in the aftermath of Sandy, some politicians have begun connecting the storm to climate change.
“We have a 100-year flood every two years now,” New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo told reporters Tuesday. “We have a new reality when it comes to these weather patterns. We have an old infrastructure and we have old systems and that is not a good combination.”
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg added: “What is clear is that the storms that we’ve experienced in the last year or so around this country and around the world are much more severe than before. Whether that’s global warming or what, I don’t know. But we’ll have to address those issues.”
Meanwhile, former Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm said Monday: “There’s a clear link to climate change. And, yet, for the first time in over a quarter century, climate change was not brought up even once at the presidential debates.”
Fox News/YouTube
Wednesday on The O’Reilly Factor, two weather experts debated Al Gore’s claims that global warming was to blame for Hurricane Sandy’s wrath. Gore said, “The storms are getting stronger. The stronger storms are getting more frequent. And you know, this is the second time in two years that part of Manhattan has been shut down … But the evidence is now so overwhelming.”
Joe Bastardi, chief meteorologist at WeatherBell Analytics calls Gore’s claims “stunningly ignorant or stunningly deceptive.” According to Bastardi, such storms are nothing new, “In the 1950s 10 major hurricanes ran the eastern seaboard. Six hit the Carolinas northward in two years.”