Slate

In the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy people with no meteorological training at all are climbing high atop media soap boxes, proclaiming that Hurricane Sandy is part of a “new normal” of extreme weather. Robert Puentes, a senior fellow with the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program said “Since we keep seeing large scale storms — the derecho this summer, Irene, Isabel — it may be wise for transit and infrastructure planners and officials to think of these as part of a new normal,” This claim is based on the often repeated warning that the increase of atmospheric carbon dioxide is causing the weather to become different than it was in the past, therefore creating a “new normal”. In other words, in the past the weather was...