Hurricane Sandy: the new face of climate change

In my lifetime I have no memory of a hurricane in New York City. I often thought of New York City as one of the safest places in the world. Who could imagine a hurricane flooding the subways of New York?

And there is Hoboken New Jersey. I was there about 10 years ago. I didn’t all look that good to begin with, but add a few feet of water in the street and it really looks bad.

And who do we have to thank for all of this? For one, we can blame all those 1 %-ers who spent so much money on “Think Tanks” that hired the best scientists in country to tell us there is no global warming. And there were the gullible followers who actually believed them, or wanted to believe them, so they stood out on side-walks with their Tea Party signs saying; “Global Warming is a Scam!”

This so called “scam” is wreaking havoc on a major financial center of the country as well as the most populated city. -សតិវ អតុ

Here are a few other looks at this phenomenon;

Hurricane Sandy: Global warming, pure and simple

We can dance around the issue all we want, but climate change was the storm's systemic cause

By George Lakoff,

This article originally appeared on AlterNet.

Yes, global warming systemically caused Hurricane Sandy — and the Midwest droughts and the fires in Colorado and Texas, as well as other extreme weather disasters around the world. Let’s say it out loud, it was causation, systemic causation.
Systemic causation is familiar. Smoking is a systemic cause of lung cancer. HIV is a systemic cause of AIDS. Working in coal mines is a systemic cause of black lung disease. Driving while drunk is a systemic cause of auto accidents. Sex without contraception is a systemic cause of unwanted pregnancies.
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From the Kasama Project;

Frankenstorms and Climate Change: How the 1% Created a Monster

This comes from Climate & Capitalism.
The riptides of climate change are beginning to tear at the fabric of our biosphere as the earth’s climate system lurches, in ungainly and lumbering jerks, from the relatively dormant and benign stability of the last 10,000 years, toward a more volatile, violent and less hospitable new climatic state previously unknown to human civilization.
Alluding, therefore, to Mary Shelley’s great work of gothic horror through the appellation of Frankenstorm for the confluence of Hurricane Sandy and a cold front is, in many ways, quite apt.  Particularly as Shelley herself offered a symbolic criticism of the inner dynamics of capitalism and class society in Frankenstein, captured in the quote above, as the conflicted Victor recounts his tale and the uncontrollable forces that he has unleashed as a result of his compulsion to continue with his project, despite the warning signs that are proliferating around him.

Frankenstorms and climate change: How the 1% created a monster

by Chris Williams
“If the study to which you apply yourself has a tendency to weaken your affections, and to destroy your taste for those simple pleasures in which no alloy can possibly mix, then that study is certainly unlawful, that is to say, not befitting the human mind.
 “If this rule were always observed; if no man allowed any pursuit whatsoever to interfere with the tranquility of his domestic affections, Greece had not been enslaved; Caesar would have spared his country; America would have been discovered more gradually; and the empires of Mexico and Peru had not been destroyed.”
—Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus, by Mary Shelley.
There is little doubt that freakish and unnaturally-assembled storms are a taste of what the future holds under an economic system that has “interfered with the tranquility of domestic affections,” galvanized the forces of nature into a fury of clashing dislocations as we pump ever-more heat-trapping gases into our atmosphere and industrial filth into our lungs.
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