According to the New York Post, the hurricane Sandy aide package included: $8 million to buy cars and equipment for the Homeland Security and Justice departments; $150 million for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to dole out to fisheries in Alaska; $2 million for the Smithsonian Institution to repair museum roofs in DC; $13 billion for”mitigation” projects to prepare for future storms; $207 million for the VA Manhattan Medical Center; $41 million to fix up eight military bases along the storm’s path, including Guantanamo Bay, Cuba; $4 million for repairs at Kennedy Space Center in Florida; $3.3 million for the Plum Island Animal Disease Center and $1.1 million to repair national cemeteries.

The legislation dealing with the “fiscal cliff” was also laden with pork, mainly to help crony capitalists in the renewable energy sector. According to the Heritage Foundation:

“The fiscal cliff deal is not only preventing certain politically motivated energy tax policies from falling off the cliff, but it’s also resurrecting ones that have been dead and buried for a year.

“Lumped into the 157-page fiscal cliff bill are extensions of energy handouts that were originally scheduled to retire, as well as retroactively rewarded tax breaks for renewable energy that expired at the end of 2011. The inclusion of these targeted tax breaks is a clear indication that Congress is not serious about (1) reducing spending, (2) ending the government’s meddling in the energy sector, or (3) standing up against political interests.

“The extension and resurrection of the targeted tax credits will reduce revenue by $18 billion over 10 years. Production tax credits for wind (totaling $12 billion) were renewed for another year and made even more generous. Thanks to the new bill, wind and other renewable energy projects can receive the tax credit simply by starting construction by 2013, rather than once they begin generating electricity, as the law originally specified.

“Further, the fiscal cliff deal retroactively rewards a production tax credit for biofuel and biodiesel production, which expired in 2011, and extends it through 2013. Tax credit extensions also go out to electric motorcycles, alternative fueling stations, coal facilities on Indian lands, cellulosic ethanol, and energy efficient windows, appliances, and new homes.”

This situation reminds me of a quote attributed to former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher: “The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.” Congress has yet to acknowledge that caveat. Apparently, nothing in Washington, D.C. can be straight forward.  Instead, almost everything is laden with pork-packed proposals for pet projects.

Let’s look at some real data from Dr. Ryan Maue (http://policlimate.com/tropical/ ).

First, we see that hurricane frequency is not increasing:

Next, we drop down the energy scale a bit to include tropical storms and see that they, as well as hurricanes are not becoming more frequent.

Finally, we look at storm intensity and see that although this is quite variable, there is no overall trend:

From these data we see that hurricanes fail to follow the AGW predictions. So, either AGW alarmists are wrong or there is no recent global warming.

Is Sandy unprecedented? No, but it is unusually strong and widespread because of the confluence of a hurricane with a major cold front from the north.

Sandy made landfall in New Jersey, so look at the history of such hurricanes from “Hurricanes and the Middle Atlantic States.” That source provides brief descriptions of 21 hurricanes that affected New Jersey between 1821 and 2011. That list includes Hurricane Hazel on October 15, 1954. So even October hurricanes are not unprecedented.

Dr. Judith Curry, in a very long assessment of lessons learned since Hurricane Katrina in 2005, notes that there is still uncertainty of exact causes of frequency and intensity. But, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) and the North Pacific Gyre Oscillation (NPGO) have dominant impacts on hurricane variability in the Pacific, and modulates the frequencies of El Nino/La Nina. Curry says, “I suspect that the combination of the PDO and NPGO can explain much of the variability in Ryan Maue’s analysis of Accumulated Cyclone Energy diagram, given that the majority of global hurricanes occur in the Pacific.” “In the Atlantic, the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO), the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), and Atlantic Meridional Mode (AMM) have all been invoked to explain variability in the Atlantic …”

Although the science of exact attribution is not settled, it does seem that AGW is not the answer since natural variability provides an explanation.

See also:

IPCC says they don’t know if the climate is becoming more extreme

Weather extremes and global warming – no increasing trend