“We should consider Sandy—and other recent extreme weather events – an early taste of a climate-changed world, and a grim preview of the even worse to come,” write Bob Corell, Jeff Masters, and Kevin Trenberth in Politico today. “It’s time to stop asking when climate change will arrive. It’s here, and we need to move aggressively to curb carbon emissions while also preparing for a changed world. We are at nothing less than a critical juncture.”

Read the full text: “Did climate change contribute to Sandy? Yes”

As Hurricane Sandy battered the East Coast this week, meteorologists and climate scientists were repeatedly asked to explain what role climate change played in amplifying the storm. …

Overall, we know that climate change has stacked the deck so that this kind of event happens more frequently. That answer, however, prompts a deeper, more unsettling question that many want to know: is climate change worsening some recent extreme weather events like super storm Sandy?

The short answer is yes. …

Kevin Trenberth, Distinguished Senior Scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, Colorado, is one of the world’s leading climate scientists, and one who has taken up the essential task of synthesizing and communicating the findings of scientific research to a wider public.  See: Kevin Trenberth on US wildfires, drought, and global warming

Jeff Masters, with a Ph.D. in meteorology from my undergraduate and graduate alma mater the University of Michigan, co-founded The Weather Underground Inc. and writes the endlessly informative Weather Underground blog.

Bob Corell is a senior policy fellow at the American Meteorological Society.  Corell is the visionary climate research leader who in the 1980s and 1990s played an essential role in creating and developing the multiagency U.S. Global Change Research Program, the world’s flagship program for climate science, and chaired it for many years (including years when I worked in the USGCRP coordination office).  He was the lead federal official during the development of the first U.S. National Assessment of Climate Change Impacts, completed in 2000 and then suppressed by the Bush Administration at the behest of the global warming denial machine, as part of their contribution to setting back the national discourse on climate change. Corell chaired the report, Informing Decisions in a Changing Climate, published by the National Academy of Sciences in 2009.

Earlier post: Has climate change created a monster?