© NY Daily News
A record-setting rainstorm flooded parts of Long Island, NY. August 13th, 2014
A record-setting rainstorm flooded parts of Long Island, NY. August 13th, 2014
A state of emergency was declared in Suffolk County, where county Executive Steve Bellone called the weather Wednesday morning a "storm of historic proportions. It was unprecedented and unpredicted - the size, the extent, the scale," Bellone said at a news conference Wednesday, also remarking that "this could be a 500-year storm we just witnessed."
Islip Town Supervisor Tom Croci said the storm brought "a historic amount of rain in a short amount of time." The Town of Brookhaven within in Suffolk County also declared a state of emergency. Officials warned that the ground was saturated and could cause sinkholes, collapsing cesspools, and the uprooting of trees. As 1010 WINS' Gary Baumgarten reported, some Suffolk County homes were still sitting on lakefront property on Wednesday night, as water was having trouble receding even with the help of municipal pumps.
"Had about 12 inches of water in the basement and 4 or 5 inches in the car" one West Islip resident said. While the storms had long since moved on by Wednesday night, standing water prompted officers to stand guard, and more problems were expected for the Thursday morning commute.
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Comment: Climate Central claims it is "a leading authority on climate science that cuts through the hype with a clear-eyed analysis of climate change, delivering just the facts and findings." Its world weather attribution project looks at the role of global warming in extreme weather events and identifies a human fingerprint. This initiative performs extreme "weather autopsies" immediately after an extreme weather event and makes a snap determination for the waiting media. They state four possible outcomes of the attribution analysis: #1) global warming increased the likelihood of the event, #2) global warming did not play a role in the event, #3) global warming reduced the likelihood of the event, and #4) the model was unable to reproduce the event. In example, Climate Central has deemed "manmade climate change significantly increased the odds of the killer European heat wave of 2003 and the Russian heat wave of 2010. Their bottom line is "YES, these events fit a pattern that climate scientists have long expected to appear as the result of increased greenhouse gasses in our atmosphere." A general scientific agreement is that global warming has contributed a trend toward more intense extremes of heat and precipitation around the world, is partly to blame for specific extreme weather events and will continue to influence both in the future."
Sounds like this ultra-scientific, fact-finding, data-digging, leading authority is feeding a pre-determined agenda with pre-determined results. It is doubtful outcomes #2,#3,#4 are ever factors. Those options do not make headlines. Greenhouse gas does.