Publication Date November 27, 2012 | USA TODAY

UN climate scientist: Sandy no coincidence

United States
Doha 2012, Photo: UNclimatechange, Flickr
Doha 2012, Photo: UNclimatechange, Flickr

Though it's tricky to link a single weather event to climate change, Hurricane Sandy 2012 was "probably not a coincidence" but an example of the extreme weather events that are likely to strike the U.S. more often as the world gets warmer, the U.N. climate panel's No. 2 scientist said Tuesday. Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, the vice chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, predicted that as stronger and more frequent heat waves and storms become part of life, people will stop asking whether global warming played a role. "The new question should probably progressively become: Is it possible that climate warming has not influenced this particular event?"