More storm surges on the way?

The Monday morning at high tide before the big storm surge from Sandy (which came at about 8 p.m. that evening and flooded the subways, tunnels, and caused the Con Ed substation down at 14th Street to explode ( which people saw on TV all over the country)--I went down to the East River Esplanade at the East End of 37th Street to see what was going on.

They had closed the gates to the Esplanade...the morning high tide gave no indication how bad the evening surge would be...just that the situation was getting hairy.

Last night, the local ABC affiliate here showed a half hour special on "Extreme Weather NYC" which predicted what were once odd occasional tornadoes and other meteorological events around this area would become more common and also get worse...

Due of course, to global warming and climate change. As the polar ice cap melts in the summer now (more and more...eventually it will melt away to nothing during the summer) and the Atlantic continues to rise in temperature, the difference between air temperatures in the far North and down towards the Equator will become less pronounced.

This will influence the flow of weather from West to East across the country...making it loop around in all sorts of ways, and even double back on itself as it did in the case of Sandy ( which should have headed out to sea instead of turning inland and slamming the South New Jersey Coast--and, of course, bringing all the flooding to the NJ-NY area).

Now that the weather in the Pacific Ocean is more or less "neutral" (neither much of an El Nino or a La Nina effect), storms in the North Atlantic will arise on their own out of nowhere and with less warning. 

So, we could be in for more storm surges this winter...and who knows how bad they might be.

Nobody wants to consider worst case scenarios at the moment, but one grumpy old weather guy on the ABC show said that " Sandy was not "The Big One" when it comes to storm surges...we will have much worse ones in the future."

So, people like NYC Mayor Bloomberg and NY Governor Cuomo are talking now about what can be done to deal with the extreme weather of the future. They seem to be confused a little here, not knowing whether to rebuild some sections like the Rockaways ( which might not be worth it, given what the future is like)...and they talk of rebuilding the boardwalk at Long Beach on the South Shore of Long Island with concrete rather than wood. (Local residents are indignant about this and insist it be rebuilt with wood. They seem to think that living there is a  workable proposition for the future, which one wonders about now. I mean, they ARE going to be wiped out again sooner or later and maybe sooner).

Some of the plans for helping to seal off the subway tunnels from water with inflatable plugs seem a little science fiction-ish, (and will take years to really work out if they decide to do it).

Just for this winter: what if there is another big storm surge and more flooding and another big power outage? The big problem will be all the boilers in buildings that will not be functioning and tons of people in the area suddenly finding themselves in the middle of the winter without heat...( or power, for that matter). How can the government handle this? Nobody even wants to consider this happening right now....and it may never happen, at least not THIS winter.

The future is just sure to have a lot more extreme weather and we had all better get used to the idea, that's all.