Most New Yorkers Think Climate Change Caused Hurricane, Poll Finds

[IDemo]

Source: New York Times

New York State voters overwhelmingly say they believe that Hurricane Sandy demonstrated the effects of climate change, according to a poll released Monday by Siena College.

Sixty-nine percent of voters tied the storm, as well as Tropical Storms Irene and Lee last year, to global climate change, compared with 24 percent who believed they were isolated weather events, the poll found.

But some skepticism remained: while 8 in 10 Democrats said the storms demonstrated climate change, Republicans were divided, with 46 percent citing climate change and 44 percent describing the storms as isolated episodes.

Voters were generally pleased with the performance of their elected officials in the wake of the storm, according to the poll, which was conducted from last Monday to Thursday. Sixty-seven percent of voters surveyed said Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo did an excellent or good job handling the storm, 61 percent approved of President Obama’s performance, and 53 percent were pleased with the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/04/nyregion/most-new-yorkers-tie-hurricane-sandy-to-climate-change-poll-finds.html

[NoOneMan]

1. So what are they going to do about it?

Stay in a production/consumption hub where their lifebloods depend on a complex supply system that can and will fail--having their standard of living grossly subsidized by fossil fuel consumption?

[harmonicon]

2. Living in New York, or any densely populated city, is about the most environmentally...

responsible thing a person could do. New Yorkers are likely to have a much smaller "carbon footprint" than most Americans.

This doesn't change the fact that they're wrong. People trying to tie a specific storm to climate change are missing the point and doing a great disservice to educating the public at large about the real effects of climate change.

[NoOneMan]

3. Outsourcing emissions isn't the same as being 'environmentally responsible'

Cities' economic systems depend upon massive industrial production centers located elsewhere and large deforested agricultural centers, having goods constantly trucked in. You don't drive? So what.

Jim Hall at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research in the UK says that, although dense cities may reduce transport emissions and act as "hugely beneficial" hubs of innovation, their total effect on the climate also depends on measures that were not captured by the current analysis.

"Cities where the service sector dominates have outsourced carbon intensive industries to developing countries, yet are still voracious consumers of industrial products," Hall says. "There is a large discrepancy between production-based and consumptions-based metrics of emissions."

Dodman agrees. "The emissions for a pair of shoes made in China and sold in the UK are currently allocated to China, not to [the UK], so it is fair to ask whether we should count emissions according to the location of production or the location that is driving the consumption." More...

If being "environmentally responsible" is important to you, stop consuming and increasing demand for energy consumption. Living in a highly dependent city isn't necessarily the best way to do this

[NoOneMan]

4. More on this...

The standard way of measuring a nation's carbon footprint is to add up the greenhouse gas emitted each year within its borders, plus – in a more comprehensive analysis – a proportion of the emissions from the ships and planes bringing people and products into and out of the country.

This approach has the advantage of being methodologically simple, but it means that emissions caused in the process of manufacturing or growing an item are assigned to the country where that item is produced, rather than the country where it is consumed. This, many commentators argue, is unfair, because it allows rich countries to claim that they are reducing their emissions when in fact they're just "outsourcing" them – relying increasingly on emerging economies such as China for carbon-intensive manufacturing processes.

What are outsourced emissions? aka 'You can't have your cake and eat it too'

The bottom line: Its complicatd and we can't put a finite number on it. All in all, emissions creep up, because of increasing energy demand from increasing social and economic complexity. In any case, it is fool-hardy to think that by living in a very complex and dependent system, you are somehow reducing the impact on the environment. New Yorkers have to eat, and that food has to come from places where its easy to clear out habitat and dump petro-based products onto the dirt (aka, not the city). All those products consumed have to come from places where labor is cheap and its ok to burn tons of coal (aka, not the city).

[jimlup]

5. Specifically yes but generally no

I don't think any survey question would be specific enough to respond correctly from a scientific perspective on Sandy so I would respond that it was "caused by AGW".

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The public doesn't understand this and it is often used by deniers to justify their untenable position. It is time to call a spade a spade.