Weather on steroids

Bloomberg published an interesting article about Hurricane Sandy and global warming.  Here are some snippets:

Yes, yes, it’s unsophisticated to blame any given storm on climate change. Men and women in white lab coats tell us -- and they’re right -- that many factors contribute to each severe weather episode. Climate deniers exploit scientific complexity to avoid any discussion at all.

... Eric Pooley, senior vice president of the Environmental Defense Fund, and former deputy editor of Bloomberg Businessweek, offers a baseball analogy: “We can’t say that steroids caused any one home run by Barry Bonds, but steroids sure helped him hit more and hit them farther. Now we have weather on steroids.”

... If all that doesn’t impress, forget the scientists ostensibly devoted to advancing knowledge and saving lives. Listen instead to corporate insurers committed to compiling statistics for profit.

On Oct. 17 the giant German reinsurance company Munich Re issued a prescient report titled Severe Weather in North America. Globally, the rate of extreme weather events is rising, and “nowhere in the world is the rising number of natural catastrophes more evident than in North America.”

From 1980 through 2011, weather disasters caused losses totaling $1.06 trillion. Munich Re found “a nearly quintupled number of weather-related loss events in North America for the past three decades.”

Business gets it.  They can't afford not to.