As the Earth Heats Slowly to a Rolling Boil, At Least You Won’t Have to Worry About Superstorm Sandy Anymore

Good news about climate change! Apparently the oven-baking of the Earth will be good for New Jersey!

Man-made global warming may further lessen the likelihood of the freak atmospheric steering currents that last year shoved Superstorm Sandy due west into New Jersey, a new study says.

“Sandy was an extremely unusual storm in several respects and pretty freaky. And some of those things that make it more freaky may happen less in the future,” said Columbia University atmospheric scientist Adam Sobel, co-author of a new study on Sandy.

Both camps agree on what happened with the weird steering that shoved Sandy, a late season hurricane that merged with a conventional storm into a massive hybrid, into New Jersey. The jet stream plunged in an odd way. A high pressure system off the coast of Canada and Greenland blocked the storm from moving east, as most do.

That high pressure block now happens once or twice a year in August, September and October. Computer models show the jet stream will move further north, so the “giant blob of high pressure” will be even less frequent next century, said study lead author Elizabeth Barnes of Colorado State University.

Now: The storms that do occur will probably be stronger and more menacing due to climate change. They just won’t come ashore near Atlantic City. Let South Carolina come up with its own “Stronger than the storm” ad campaign.