Hurricane Sandy Climate Change Connection Looms Large Over UN Conference in Qatar

The impact of Hurricane Sandy looms large over the latest United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, a two-week conference already in progress in Doha, Qatar.

The conference brings together 17,000 scientists and diplomats from 195 countries to hash out decisions and direction for the international community in dealing with the coming challenges of climate change.

Most climate scientists agree that rising global temperatures caused by human activity and the burning of fossil fuels increases the intensity of severe weather events like droughts, forest fires and hurricanes.

"The damage caused by Sandy was worse because of sea level rise," said Princeton University climate scientist Michael Oppenheimer. Due to climate change, sea level in New York City is a foot higher than it was 100 years ago.

Officials in New York estimate Hurricane Sandy caused $38 billion in damage.

The delegates in Doha are trying to come to some kind of compromise to extend the goals of the Kyoto Protocol, the 15-year-old climate deal that aimed to reduce global carbon emissions to 1990 levels. The United States and China, the world's largest polluters, never signed on to the Kyoto Protocol, so work continues to nail down an agreement that the two giants will go along with.

The last four years under President Obama have seen a softening of the United States' position on emissions. The country has spent $90 billion investing in renewable technologies, increased gas mileage in cars and doubled the amount of electricity generated from renewable sources.

"The United States and China have the most to gain from clean energy technology," said Dan Kammen, director of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley.

"Germany, Denmark, Korea and others have really been scaling up their green technology, both in production and deployment, and benefiting from the push and pull of technology," Kammen said. "Both the United States and China have failed on that."