Still-vex'd Bermoothes

The Tempest, Act 1, scene 1. Engraving, 1797, after a painting by George Romney. From Wikipedia.

If you want to help out the victims of the superstorm, money works better than canned food and batteries for most organizations: I suggest The Lower East Side Recovers, which is connected to Occupy Wall Street, affiliated with the international UVON (Use Verbs in Organization Names) and 350.org.

Up by Riverside Park, we've been having a very easy Sandy, actual damage limited to a few downed trees. My neighbor Donna suggested that Irene last year culled the weak ones—our trees are survivors! Which brings me immediately to the thought that OMG, New York City has a hurricane every year now! Do ya think the climate might be changing?

The answer, for everybody but David Brooks (I note this morning that even Ross Douthat has a better understanding of statistics than Brooks does) and that "unskewed" fool (unscrewed, if you ask me), is that one event isn't evidence, so no, Sandy and Irene don't prove human-caused global warming, but they are sure as hell consistent with it.

Sandy has inspired Governor Andrew Cuomo to acknowledge that climate change is a "new reality" along with a bunch of other normally silent suspects, but Cuomo himself—I just heard him on the radio—isn't coming out with us crazies and supporting a carbon tax and pro-active moves on those lines; he likes defensive, New Amsterdam emulating Old Amsterdam and putting up more dykes. Sorry, Hans Brinker, you'll have to cancel your skate race, but what the hell, there's no ice anyway.

Madurodam, Scheveningen, Netherlands. From Wikipedia.