- New York will be "highly vulnerable" when future storms hit, professor says
- Many argue "soft infrastructure," like tidal marshes and islands, would help
- Loss of summer Arctic ice cover also adds to the problem
- "Sandy is a foretaste of things to come," Princeton professor says
(CNN) -- We should not be surprised. That's the view of many climate scientists as they survey the destruction wrought by the superstorm that ravaged the Northeast this week. The melting of Arctic ice, rising sea levels, the warming atmosphere and changes to weather patterns are a potent combination likely to produce storms and tidal surges of unprecedented intensity, according to many experts.
Recognizing the threat, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is developing a strategy for mitigating the growing risk from storm surges and flooding along the city's 500 miles of coastline. In such a densely-populated area of so much expensive real estate, surrounded by a complex web of estuaries, tides and ocean, it is a huge challenge. And in the face of global changes, even a city as inventive as New York can only do so much.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicted in 2007 that the global average sea level would rise between seven and 23 inches by the end of this century. More recent projections suggest that the melting of sea ice could mean a rise in excess of 30 inches. The New York State Sea Level Rise Task Force translated that into a local projection of 2 to 5 inches by the 2020s, and with rapid Arctic ice melt the rise could be as much as 5 to 10 inches over the next fifteen years. Combine that with a trend toward more intense storms and New York is "highly vulnerable," professor Michael Oppenheimer of Princeton University told CNN.
"(Superstorm) Sandy is a foretaste of things to come," he predicted, "from the combination of bigger storms and higher sea levels, both of which contribute equally to the growing threat."
See submerged subway in Manhattan New York dodged a bullet by inches last year as the remnants of Hurricane Irene bore down. Ben Orlove, director of the master's program in Climate and Society at Columbia University, wrote on CNN.com: "Irene also arrived at a time of especially high tides, and its storm surge came within inches of flooding the sea wall. Storms and tides are natural, but sea level rise is not. As it continues, New York grows more vulnerable."
Oppenheimer, a professor of geosciences, recently modeled the effect of climate change on storm surges for the New York area. In a paper published by Nature in February, he and three colleagues concluded that the "storm of the century" would become the storm of "every twenty years or less."
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo appears to agree.
"After what happened, what has been happening in the last few years, I don't think anyone can sit back anymore and say 'Well, I'm shocked at that weather pattern,'" he said Tuesday.
The conclusion of Oppenheimer and his colleagues is that storms will become larger and more powerful.
"Climate change will probably increase storm intensity and size simultaneously, resulting in a significant intensification of storm surges," they wrote. Sandy had a diameter of some 900 miles, much larger than most storms.
A study of the New York area in 2010 led by Guy Nordenson, an architect and structural engineer whose offices are in lower Manhattan, concluded: "There is a prevalent risk that the city will be severely paralyzed due to the predicted inundation and wave action associated with storm surge."
In addition, salt-water intrusion could compromise the quality of drinking water and weaken ecosystems, Nordenson and others concluded in the book "On the Water: Palisade Bay."
But the answer, they argue, is not solely in engineering. "Cities fortify their coasts to protect real estate at the expense of nature ... the hard engineering habit has proven costly, unreliable and ineffective."
Nordenson is serving on a task force set up by Mayor Michael Bloomberg to study ways of giving New York a more resilient waterfront. He told CNN that the region needs a combination of strategies that includes more "soft infrastructure." New York is losing tidal marshes at a rapid pace, partly because of the rise in sea level but also because of development.
Sandy blows snow into N.C. mountains Among the big ideas in "On the Water: Palisade Bay": create an archipelago of islands and reefs in the New York-New Jersey Upper Bay to dampen powerful storm currents, the islands being "fingered" (with many inlets) and combining tidal marshes and parks.
Nordenson points to the example of the Netherlands and cities like Hamburg that incorporate flood plains into their planning. Similarly Hurricane Katrina showed the importance of preserving Gulf coastal swamps. He hopes a project with the New York Port Authority to begin using dredged material for natural barriers will get underway soon.
Nordenson and his team of engineers, architects and designers showed some of their ideas at the Museum of Modern Art for an exhibition called "Rising Currents."
At the local level, the Nature Conservancy is working with communities in Long Island to identify the risks from rising sea levels and protect wetlands. Sarene Marshall, who leads the Conservancy's Global Climate Change Team, estimates that every dollar spent in preventive measures saves $5 in disaster recovery, and that long-term investment in natural infrastructure is more effective than hard engineering. She points to the value of the humble oyster reef, nature's version of the sea wall.
Paul Greenburg, writing in The New York Times Tuesday, echoes her point, saying that in previous centuries "a bivalve population that numbered in the trillions ... played a critical role in stabilizing the shoreline from Washington to Boston."
The Nature Conservancy estimates such reefs can reduce the storm risks for 7 million Americans living on the shore.
But islands, oysters and other measures to mitigate storm surges can't isolate New York from trends thousands of miles away in the Arctic. A growing body of evidence links the disappearance of summer ice cover in the Arctic with changing weather patterns.
Over the past three decades, about 1.3 million square miles of Arctic sea ice has disappeared, equivalent to 42 percent of the area of the lower 48 states.
Climate models previously projected that the Arctic might lose almost all of its summer ice cover by 2100, but some scientists believe the trend is now accelerating and that it will be gone long before then.
"In addition to the extent of sea ice, what remains is thinner than it used to be," said Walter Meier of the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado.
Less sea ice means warmer water. Sea surface temperatures off the coast of the northeast United States are now the highest ever recorded.
"It's like leaving the fridge door open," said Meier. The only way to restrain the process would be to moderate temperature increases, which in turn would depend on lowering carbon dioxide emissions.
Jennifer Francis at the Institute of Marine and Coastal Sciences at Rutgers University has shown that a warmer Arctic tends to slow the jet stream, causing it to meander and in turn prolong weather patterns. It's called Arctic amplification, and it may be helping entrench drought in the northwest United States and lead to warmer summers in the Northern Hemisphere.
But there may be another effect.
"Larger swings in the jet stream allow frigid air from the Arctic to plunge farther south, as well as warm, moist tropical air to penetrate northward," Francis wrote in Yale University's Environment 360 blog. That's pretty much what happened this week, a spectacular collision of Arctic and tropical weather fronts.
A recent article in the journal Oceanography shed more light on the consequences of Arctic ice melt. Charles Greene at Cornell University and others wrote that fundamental changes in the behavior of the jet stream will "stack the deck in favor of severe winter weather outbreaks in the United States and Europe into the foreseeable future."
Given the scale of the challenge, Oppenheimer and others believe there needs to be urgent remedial action to mitigate the effects, such as raising subway entrances and reinforcing the lower floors of buildings. At the moment, Oppenheimer said, there's a lot of evaluating hazards and too little action to address them.
After a sudden deluge in 2007 that closed part of the subway system, the New York Metropolitan Transit Authority committed more than $30 million to raise ventilation grates and redesign the entrances to some subway stations. It's also spent heavily on pumps, but a substantial surge would soon overcome such remedial measures. And beside the subway lines, power transformers and fiber-optic networks are vulnerable to flooding.
More ambitious actions would have far-reaching political and economic consequences. New York State's Sea Level Rise Task Force was created in 2007 and delivered its report to the legislature on the last day of 2010. Among its key recommendations was greater reliance on natural protection such as marshland and a tightening of zoning laws to prevent the loss of such features.
New York City disagreed with the panel's more critical recommendations, saying they did "not recognize the differences between undeveloped areas and densely populated cities." The city's own task force rejected the idea of limiting development as prohibitively expensive.
Douglas Hill of the Storm Surge Research Group at Stony Brook University has proposed a chain of massive sea barriers in Long Island Sound that could be closed to prevent flooding whenever a storm surge threatens. One would be close to the Verrazano Narrows bridge. (The Thames Barrier in London performs such a role in a more modest way.) But the cost would probably exceed $10 billion; a barrier in Venice cost $7 billion.
Among other options: tougher regulations on where industrial and chemical plants can be situated, improving the design of buildings to make lower levels flood-proof (known as freeboard in the insurance industry) and "soft edges" that better break wave action.
Stronger and maybe higher seawalls around more vulnerable parts of Manhattan might also help. The current seawalls are about 4 to 5 feet above the average sea level. Many were built at the beginning of the last century. A New York Times article from August 1901 marveled at "The Massive Sea Wall Which Will Encompass Manhattan."
"It will be many generations, perhaps centuries, before the wall ... will have to be rebuilt or will even require any extensive repairs," the Times reported then. That was before climate change became part of the lexicon. New York City's "Vision 2020" plan warned that sea walls and other shoreline structures are likely to need more frequent repair because of more damaging storms.
Whether Sandy will drive the issue of climate change up the political agenda seems doubtful. According to a recent Pew Research Center poll, 67% of Americans believe the Earth is warming, up slightly since 2010, but that's 10 percentage points less than in 2006. Among both Democrats and Republicans, the percentage has declined, as has the number (now 64%) who say it's a serious problem.
Sarene Marshall of the Nature Conservancy says the lack of debate about climate change in the presidential election campaign has been "unfortunate," but believes that Americans are getting to the point of recognizing what they see for what it is.
Aerial images from the U.S. Coast Guard show the coastline in Brigantine, New Jersey, on Tuesday, October 30. Sandy struck land near Atlantic City, New Jersey, around high tide Monday night. 
Homes and other buildings in Brigantine were destroyed in Sandy's wake. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie described the devastation in the state as "unthinkable." 
Brigantine saw extensive damage from high winds and flooding. 
Homes are flooded Tuesday in Tuckerton, New Jersey. President Barack Obama signed major disaster declarations for New Jersey and New York, clearing the way for federal aid. 
A resident walks down a street covered in beach sand due to flooding from Hurricane Sandy in Long Beach, New York on Tuesday. 
Firefighters work to extinguish flames in a home in the Breezy Point neighborhood of Queens on Tuesday. The massive fire broke out during the storm and destroyed at least 80 homes 
Ted Wondsel, owner of Ted's Fishing Station in Long Beach, assesses the damage to his business Tuesday. 
People wait outside a shelter at the Bergen County Technical Schools Teterboro Campus on Tuesday in Hasbrouck Heights, New Jersey. 
Utility workers from Delmarva Power replace a power pole that was damaged during Hurricane Sandy in Ocean City, Maryland, on Tuesday. 
Dale Kelly sits on a bench Tuesday on a flooded street in Ocean City, New Jersey, which was hit hard by Superstorm Sandy. 
Ted Wondsel, left, of Point Lookout works on part of a dock destroyed in the storm in Long Beach on Tuesday. 
West Broadway in Long Beach is covered in beach sand due to flooding from Hurricane Sandy on Tuesday. 
Residents walk along a street covered in beach sand after floodwaters from Superstorm Sandy retreated Tuesday in Long Beach. 
A small plane damaged in the storm sits on a runway in Farmingdale, New York, on Tuesday. 
Streets remain flooded in portions of Ocean City, New Jersey. 
Utility workers repair a traffic signal damaged by the storm in Ocean City, New Jersey, on Tuesday. 
A Virgin Mary statue stands in the Breezy Point neighborhood of Queens, New York, on Tuesday after a fire fed by high winds destroyed at least 80 homes, officials said. 
President Barack Obama outlines the federal government's response to Superstorm Sandy at the Red Cross headquarters in Washington. 
Firefighters work to contain the fire in Queens on Tuesday. Some 200 firefighters battled the six-alarm blaze. 
A man surveys damage to sailboats Tuesday at a marina on City Island in New York. 
"My message to the federal government: no bureaucracy, no red tape, get resources where they're needed as fast as possible, as hard as possible, and for the duration," Obama said in Washington Tuesday. Both Obama and Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney canceled campaign events. 
People stand on a mound of construction dirt on Tuesday to view a section of the uptown boardwalk in Atlantic City, New Jersey, that was destroyed by flooding. 
A firefighter looks through debris in Queens on Tuesday. In September, the same area endured severe weather as a powerful cold front brought heavy rain, high winds and a tornado. 
A malfunctioning generator billows black smoke at a building in New York on Tuesday. 
Mitt Romney helps gather donated goods for storm relief Tuesday in Kettering, Ohio. 
Emergency personnel help a resident of Little Ferry, New Jersey, onto a boat after rescuing her from floodwater on Tuesday. 
Dean Walter, left. and Henry Young walk along a seawall in Scituate, Massachusetts, with their surfboards after going into the heavy surf for about 20 minutes on Tuesday. 
Superstorm Sandy left New York's South Street Seaport flooded and covered in debris on Tuesday. 
Passers-by look at a car that was crushed by a tree near New York's financial district on Tuesday. 
Pedestrians and bikers cross the Brooklyn Bridge after the storm on Tuesday. 
People stand among the debris of the destroyed section of Atlantic City, New Jersey's, uptown boardwalk on Tuesday. 
Sailboats rest on the ground after being tipped over by Superstorm Sandy on City Island, New York, on Tuesday. 
Onlookers watch a dangling crane, damaged in the winds of Superstorm Sandy, atop a luxury high-rise under construction in midtown Manhattan on Tuesday. 
An onlooker snaps a photo of the damaged crane on Tuesday. 
Jolito Ortiz helps clean up a friend's apartment on New York's lower east side on Tuesday. 
A tidal surge created by Sandy flooded the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel in New York on Tuesday. 
A worker cuts down a tree near American University in Washington on Tuesday. 
A home badly damaged by Superstorm Sandy sits along the shoreline in Milford, Connecticut, on Tuesday. 
An emergency worker carries a resident through floodwaters in Little Ferry, New Jersey, on Tuesday. 
Police walk past debris left by the storm at Battery Park in New York on Tuesday. 
Floodwater splashes into the window of a building on the shore in Bellport, New York, on Tuesday. 
Rescue workers use a hovercraft to rescue a resident using a wheelchair from floodwaters in Little Ferry, New Jersey, on Tuesday. 
A resident of Little Ferry, New Jersey, assists in rescue efforts with his personal watercraft on Tuesday. 
The HMS Bounty, a 180-foot sailboat, is submerged in the Atlantic Ocean about 90 miles southeast of Hatteras, North Carolina, on Monday, October 29. 
A man walks through the debris of a 2,000-foot section of Atlantic City, New Jersey's "uptown" boardwalk on Tuesday. It was destroyed by flooding from Sandy. 
Downed trees are removed near the Korean War Veterans Memorial in Washington on Tuesday. 
Heavy surf buckles Ocean Avenue in Avalon, New Jersey, on Tuesday. 
Sam Rigby walks on Tuesday near an uprooted tree that grazed his house and hit his neighbor's house in Washington. 
A photographer shoots waves in Lake Michigan generated by the remnants of Sandy as they crash into the Chicago shoreline on Tuesday. 
A police officer helps remove a tree branch brought down during the storm in Washington on Tuesday. 
A man takes pictures of cars from the steps of a home on a flooded street at Hoboken in New Jersey, on Tuesday. 
A woman wades through water at the South Street Seaport in New York City on Tuesday. 
A street light and utility pole lie on the street in Avalon, New Jersey, on Tuesday. 
Atlantic City, New Jersey, resident Kim Johnson inspects the area around her flooded apartment building on Tuesday. 
A power line knocked over by a falling tree blocks a street in Chevy Chase, Maryland, on Tuesday. 
Workers shovel debris from the streets in Ocean City, Maryland, on Tuesday. 
A U.S. Coast Guard helicopter flies over Central Park in New York on Tuesday. 
A man jogs near a darkened Manhattan skyline on Tuesday after much of New York City lost electricity. 
Workers clear a tree blocking East 96th Street in Central Park in New York on Tuesday. 
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