Along with kelp, raw sewage and gasoline, Hurricane Sandy has also managed to wash onto our shores a hearty dose of post-disaster apocalyptica.

Sandy has been rough for New York (for some New Yorkers more than others, of course) but, the total bill for Sandy is estimated at $50 Billion.  My completely uneducated guess is that it will be much more, because it seems that these estimates always fall short of the total in the end.

But the conversation about rising sea levels and global warming (sorry, ahem, “climate change”) has found new fuel in the aftermath of the hurricane.  Perhaps rightly so, or not.  For those advocating the climate-change agenda, you could say this began a pivotal battle in an ongoing war.

And you could say the man who inadvertently ignited it was Andrew Cuomo, Governor of New York.

“There have been a series of extreme weather events. That is not a political statement; that is a factual statement,” Cuomo said in a press conference after Sandy hit. “Anyone who says there is not a change in weather patterns is denying reality.”

Cuomo was not explicitly connecting hurricanes to climate change, but his insistence that his words were “not a political statement” suggested an acute awareness of a sensitive issue.

Others are not being so subtle.

There may be no connection between Sandy and climate change–we have to be willing to acknowledge that possibility.

Some people at Fox News certainly have and they have quoted some scientists who argue against the contention that climate change caused or magnified Sandy.  REAL scientists.  By that I mean, NOT Ann Coulter.

Then again, a smart writer named Mark Fischetti at Scientific American has a well-reported piece arguing exactly how Sandy WAS in fact magnified by climate change, and that extreme weather events.  Fischetti according to  a recent op-ed in the Washington Post by James Hansen at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York,

“Our analysis shows that it is no longer enough to say that global warming will increase the likelihood of extreme weather and to repeat the caveat that no individual weather event can be directly linked to climate change. To the contrary, our analysis shows that, for the extreme hot weather of the recent past, there is virtually no explanation other than climate change.”

Well there you have it.  We are absolutely sure that climate change is affecting weather patterns.  And, yet, some of us (some actual scientists) are absolutely sure that we cannot be sure climate change is affecting weather pattern.

Consider one scientist quoted in the aforementioned Fox News piece.

“Neither the frequency of tropical or extratropical cyclones over the North Atlantic are projected to appreciably change due to climate change, nor have there been indications of a change in their statistical behavior over this region in recent decades,” said Martin Hoerling, a meteorologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

This is a contentious debate, and, oddly, it seems to carry an echo of debates between believers and atheists—it doesn’t feel futile, it just leaves me wondering if it is the best use of our time.

On November 24, the New York Times ran this piece and this piece and this piece, all opinion pieces about climate change, inevitably rising seas, and what to do about them, or how we can do nothing to stop them.  They were fine articles and were written by people who have researched the topic, and, to be fair, one was written by professors at Wharton and was about how we should begin to think about paying for the damage incurred by extreme weather events, should they continue or proliferate.

I would like to discuss each of these pieces in greater depth, but it is not so much their content that concerns me now.  It is the fact that they all have struck at the same time.  And, beyond asking ourselves how we should assess the risks and damages associated with future storms (and who should foot the bill), I sometimes think we are not really going anywhere with this discussion.  It seems clear that economic concerns continue to trump the specters of climate change and atmospheric pollution, and it sometimes seems as though it will have to get worse–much worse–before the entire world, or enough of the world, gathers the will to do anything about it.

Mayor Bloomberg endorsed Barack Obama for a second presidential term, citing climate change.  

Does Bloomberg think Obama can stop climate change?  Or hurricanes?  Scientists cited in one of the articles hyperlinked above (“Rising Seas, Vanishing Coastlines” by Benjamin Strauss and Robert Kopp) said,

“This past summer, a disconcerting new scientific study by the climate scientist Michiel Schaeffer and colleagues — published in the journal Nature Climate Change — suggested that no matter how quickly we cut this pollution, we are unlikely to keep the seas from climbing less than five feet.”

(Hyperlinks not mine)

Some have the idea of building floodgates, or levees around New York City–and those may be necessary.  Maybe they will even work.

But I cannot see how these sorts of conversations will push us closer to adopting cleaner technologies in the short term.

Simple economics might, though.  Cleantech will win every time it can add even a few cents to someone’s bottom line.

In the meantime, don’t forget your water wings.