Climate Change: Was Sandy a warning?

>>> of the impact of sandy in the new york metro area has many people bringing up two words, climate change . normally busy hubs like battery park , where under water, was not seen in decades. here was governor cuomo bringing up the topic of climate change during a recent news conference.

>> anyone who says there's not a dramatic change in weather patterns, i think is denying reality. and i would like to say this is probably the last occurrence we will have, i don't believe that. i said to the president kiddingly the other day, we have a 100-year flood every two years now.

>> joining me now is chris hayes . he's the host of "up with chris hayes " here on msnbc. chris, good to have you here. i want to show everybody this. it's pretty scary stuff that shows what could happen in the city with an 18-foot storm surge . there's one word that will pass through everybody's mind. basically, catastrophe. one wond what we're seeing today. governor cuomo wasn't the only person to bring up climate change . so did al gore in a blog post he recently put up. he called sandy a warning. do you think this is a big warning and the fact it has the governor's attention -- the governor's attention's been on this. he's saying the frequency of this, it's not political, but we got to look at it from the frequency standpoint.

>> we are entering an era of climate disruption. we are right now seeing the beginnings of this. this is going to be the warmest year on record. we had record droughts. we're seeing disruption across the planet. it's important for people to understand this. we started putting carbon at industrial scale into the atmosphere starting in the industrial revolution . there's already more than 100 years of that in the air. we've already warmed the earth's temperature by about 8/10 of a degree. people will look at this and say, well, there were bad storms in the 1930s . indeed, there were. the best way to think about this is to think about steroids and baseball. all right? if a baseball player is on steroids, you can't point at any one home run and say, that home run was because of steroids. if you look over the course of the year and they hit 60 homers where they used to hit 35, you know something is up. when we see the frequency and intensity of storms, every single metric we have right now is telling us that climate change isn't some abstraction in the future we need to worry about and prepare for. it is happening now. it is out the door. there are two things that need to happen politically. we need a radical, crash program to dramatically reduce the amount of carbon we put in the atmosphere. in parallel, we need to reconceptualize our civil engineers to deal with this.

>> for people that may not look at this, the easy way to look at it is the amount of named storms. we're at the end of the alphabet in this one year. 14 months ago we had irene. look at the year we've had, just 2012 as our example. how are politicians going to be able to talk about this? cuomo is trying to dance around it by not bringing up climate p change, the word frequency. the patterns we need to look at. how do they do this without shooting themselves in the foot?

>> they need to be bold about it. they need to name the facts. it cannot be cowed by the fact that the energy companies have created a massive infrastructure to bludgeon anyone who steps out of line on this. 30 years from now we will look back at the silence of this issue in horror. it will seem inconceivable we sat and let this go by. the fact of the matter is there are going to be more climate events like this. we already saw it this summer. you had fields burning. you had incredible drought across much of the country. more and more is going to be the case. the actual effects of people's every day lives are visible and observable. we're already seeing it showing up in the polling. you're not going to be able to deny reality that people are witnessing tangibly every day. there's going to be some massive cataclysmic event in the near future , i fear, that is going to take what it's going to precipitate the action we need.

>> chris, great to have you here. as a reminder, you can catch chris hayes here up saturdays and sundays at 8:00 a.m . join the crew. we're back after this. [