Poll: Was Hurricane Sandy Caused by Global Warming?

What a dismally awful article! What should be discussed are the vast improvements in storm tracking and prediction and the many lives saved as a result. Compare “Sandy” with the 1900 Galveston hurricane (from Wikipedia):

The Hurricane of 1900 made landfall on September 8, 1900 in the city of Galveston, Texas, in the United States.[1] It had estimated winds of 145 miles per hour (233 km/h) at landfall, making it a Category 4 storm on the Saffir–Simpson Hurricane Scale.[2] It was the deadliest hurricane in US history, and the second costliest hurricane in US history based on the US dollar’s 2005 value (to compare costs with those of Hurricane Katrina and others).
The hurricane caused great loss of life with the estimated death toll between 6,000 and 12,000 individuals;[3] the number most cited in official reports is 8,000, giving the storm the third-highest number of deaths or injuries of any Atlantic hurricane, after the Great Hurricane of 1780 and 1998’s Hurricane Mitch. The Galveston Hurricane of 1900 is the deadliest natural disaster ever to strike the United States. By contrast, the second-deadliest storm to strike the United States, the 1928 Okeechobee Hurricane, caused more than 2,500 deaths, and the deadliest storm of recent times, Hurricane Katrina, claimed the lives of approximately 1,800 people.

Nobody had any idea what was coming. Considering how much more densly populated we are now, without modern storm tracking and prediction and the communications network to get the word out, storms like Sandy would be much deadlier. Cleanup will be a bitch, but we won’t have to pave the streets of New York over thousands of unexcavated and uncounted bodies of storm victims as they did in Galveston.