Did global warming cause superstorm Sandy?

Climate scientists warn that global warming is likely to increase the incidence of serious events like Hurricane Sandy. Warming water and rising sea levels may be contributing to what New York politicians are calling their 'new reality.'?

By Seth Borenstein,?Associated Press / October 30, 2012

This NOAA satellite image taken Tuesday, shows superstorm Sandy slowly moving westward while weakening across southern Pennsylvania.

AP Photo/NOAA

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Climate?scientist Michael Oppenheimer stood along the Hudson River and watched his research come to life as Hurricane Sandy blew through New York.

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Just eight months earlier, the Princeton University professor reported that what used to be once-in-a-century devastating floods in New York City would soon happen every three to 20 years. He blamed global warming for pushing up sea levels and?changing?hurricane patterns.

New York "is now highly vulnerable to extreme hurricane-surge flooding," he wrote.

For more than a dozen years, Oppenheimer and other?climate?scientists have been warning about the risk for big storms and serious flooding in New York. A 2000 federal report about global warming's effect on the United States warned specifically of that possibility.

Still, they say it's unfair to blame?climate?change?for Sandy and the destruction it left behind. They cautioned that they cannot yet conclusively link a single storm to global warming, and any connection is not as clear and simple as environmental activists might contend.

"The ingredients of this storm seem a little bit cooked by?climate?change, but the overall storm is difficult to attribute to global warming," Canada's University of Victoria?climate?scientist Andrew Weaver said.

Some individual parts of Sandy and its wrath seem to be influenced by?climate?change, several?climate scientists said.

First, there's sea level rise. Water levels around New York are a nearly a foot (0.3 meters) higher than they were 100 years ago, said Penn State University?climate?scientist Michael Mann.

Add to that the temperature of the Atlantic Ocean, which is about 2 degrees Fahrenheit (.8 degrees Celsius) warmer on average than a century ago, said Katharine Hayhoe, a?climate?scientist at Texas Tech University. Warm water fuels hurricanes.

And Sandy zipped north along a warmer-than-normal Gulf Stream that travels from the Caribbean to Ireland, said Jeff Masters, meteorology director for the private service Weather Underground.

Meteorologists are also noticing more hurricanes late in the season and even after the season. A 2008 study said the Atlantic hurricane season seems to be starting earlier and lasting longer but found no explicit link to global warming. Normally there are 11 named Atlantic storms. The past two years have seen 19 and 18 named storms. This year, with one month to go, there are 19.

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/feeds/science/~3/P7jnT6k7ov8/Did-global-warming-cause-superstorm-Sandy

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U.S. economists win Nobel for applying match-making

STOCKHOLM (Reuters) - Life-saving kidney exchange programs and ways for schools to select students are just two practical applications of the market-matching theories for which U.S. economists Alvin Roth and Lloyd Shapley won the Nobel prize for economics on Monday.

Pairing up employers with job seekers - for instance doctors and lawyers taking up their first appointments - are other examples of how Roth, 60, and Shapley, 89, have separately applied game theory to daily life.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which awards the 8 million crown ($1.2 million) prize, called their work an outstanding example of economic engineering.

Roth and other economists who study market design are essentially exploring how matching procedures can be improved to produce better results for all concerned.

Speaking to Reuters over an early-morning cup of coffee from California, Roth gave the example of Stanford, his alma mater, to which he recently returned after a long spell at Harvard.

Stanford competes for students with the likes of Harvard and Princeton, and who is admitted does not depend solely on price. Stanford keeps its tuition costs low enough to attract plenty of applicants and selects among them.

"So there is choice going on, on both sides. It's a little like getting married. Taking a job is like this too," Roth said.

"And it turns out that, to some extent, getting an organ for transplantation is a little like it. So there are a lot of things that you get in life that you can't just choose. You also have to be chosen. And that's what we study. We study matching."

MATCHING MARKETS, SAVING LIVES

Roth, in a series of empirical studies, built on separate work much earlier by Shapley, an emeritus professor at the University of California Los Angeles, who had used game theory to compare various matching methods and make sure the matches were acceptable to all counterparts.

Roth, who was sleeping when Stockholm came on the phone and missed the first call to inform him of his prize, described his work as studying "courtship" of many kinds.

"You can't just have what you want; you also have to do some courtship and there is courtship on both sides and we study the marketplace processes by which those types of courtship are resolved."

The economics prize, officially called the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, was established by Sweden's central bank in 1968. It was not part of the original group of awards, for sciences and promoting peace, that was set out in dynamite tycoon Nobel's 1895 will.

"This is very much what economics is about," said Tore Ellingsen, a Nobel committee member and a professor at the Stockholm School of Economics. "How to allocate scarce resources as well as possible, to economize."

Roth has applied market design theory to the public schools admissions process in New York and Boston.

He is also a co-founder of the New England Program for Kidney Exchange, www.nepke.org, which draws on his work on matching markets to bring together pairs of compatible kidney donors and recipients.

"Here is an economic theorist who hasn't just made things more efficient. He has actually saved lives. It is unclear whether it is the economics Nobel he deserved or the Nobel prize for medicine," Joshua Gans, a professor of strategic management at the University of Toronto, wrote on www.digitopoly.org.

(Additional reporting by Patrick Lannin and Niklas Pollard in Stockholm and Edward Krudy and Ros Krasny in Boston; Writing by Alan Wheatley; Editing by Alastair Macdonald)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/americans-roth-shaply-win-nobel-prize-economics-110737894.html

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