Did Hurricane Sandy change the discussion about climate change in the United States? In this latest episode of the Wilson Center’s Dialogue program, Senior Wilson Center Advisor and Ohio University Professor Geoff Dabelko joins host John Milewski to discuss the potential impact of Sandy on climate policy and dialogue in the United States with Darryl Fears (The Washington Post) and Bob Deans (Natural Resources Defense Council).

Opening the Door to a Complicated Debate

The fact that the storm hit the densely populated Northeast corridor and the financial heart of the country has helped change perceptions, said Dabelko. It upends the notion that climate change is something that happens overseas and provides “greater opportunity for discussion” here in the United States.

And the timing too played a major role. The storm coincided with the end of a presidential election where voters “had the clearest choice in history…between one candidate who said climate change is a joke, and another who said that it’s a threat to our future,” said Deans. “And overwhelmingly the country went for the guy who said this is a threat.”

But although climate change may be receiving more attention, its complexities are still a challenge to communicate.

On the one hand, climate change means more variability in weather patterns. Deans pointed out that Sandy was preceded by the worst U.S. drought in over half a century, for example.

On the other hand, Dabelko warned against drawing explicit ties between a warming world and specific weather events. Reducing today’s major storms to a direct result of climate change doesn’t show the full picture; after all, he said, “we had storms before the Industrial Revolution started doubling the CO2 emissions level concentrations in the atmosphere.”

“Part of it is there are multiple stresses,” he said, and that ambiguity “can complicate the debate,” tempting people to say, “It’s not wholly climate so therefore we don’t care.”

For the complete article, please see New Security Beat.

Video Credit: Dialogue at the Wilson Center.