Observatory: Surrounded by Humans, Elephant in South Korea Learns to ‘Speak’

Current Biology

Angela Stoeger and Daniel Mietchen recording Koshik's vocalizations at the Everland Zoo in South Korea.

At the Everland Zoo in South Korea, there is a young male elephant that can speak Korean.

His vocabulary includes "annyong" (hello), "anja" (sit down), "aniya" (no), "nuo" (lie down) and "choah" (good). Researchers say the elephant, whose name is Koshik, vocalizes in a novel way: He puts his trunk in his mouth.

The findings appear in the journal Current Biology.

"We asked native Korean speakers to write down what they heard, and they understood him," said Angela S. Stoeger, a biologist at the University of Vienna and one of the study's authors. "We also compared his imitative vocalizations with that of other elephants, and it was very different."

In fact, Koshik seems to imitate the pitch and timbre of human speech, and of his trainers in particular.

The researchers think that Koshik started imitating human speech out of a need to socialize. For seven years when he was a juvenile and at a critical stage in his development, he was the only elephant at Everland Zoo.

"He adapted vocalizations to his human companions, the only social contact he had," Dr. Stoeger said.

It is not clear, however, how much Koshik understands, or whether he is capable of learning more. While he seems to know the meaning of "sit," for instance, he does not expect his trainers to sit when he says the word himself.

"He's basically using this as a social function, but not really to communicate with the keepers," Dr. Stoeger said.

Since 2002, Koshik has had a female Asian elephant as a companion. Although he interacts and socializes with her using typical calls, he also continues to produce his Korean utterances with the people around him.

Previously, Dr. Stoeger and her colleagues discovered an African elephant that imitates the sound of truck engines and another African elephant that imitates the sounds of the Asian elephants that it grew up near.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: November 2, 2012

The caption with an earlier version of this article misstated the given name of the University of Vienna researcher who described vocalizations by a young elephant in South Korea. She is Angela S. Stoeger, not Ashley.

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A New Kind of Tutoring Aims to Make Students Smarter

Marcus Yam for The New York Times

In this exercise at LearningRx in Upper Montclair, N.J., a trainee tosses a bean bag on the beat of a metronome while doing addition or recalling a sentence, one letter at a time.

IN the back room of a suburban storefront previously occupied by a yoga studio, Nick Vecchiarello, a 16-year-old from Glen Ridge, N.J., sits at a desk across from Kathryn Duch, a recent college graduate who wears a black shirt emblazoned with the words "Brain Trainer." Spread out on the desk are a dozen playing cards showing symbols of varying colors, shapes and sizes. Nick stares down, searching for three cards whose symbols match.

Peripheral Challenge

An interactive exercise from Posit Science, aimed at visual precision and expanding peripheral field.

Memory Training

Online games from Cogmed, aimed at working memory and focus.

Attention Teaser

An exercise performed at LearningRx centers, aimed at focus, working memory and visual manipulation skills.

Juan Arredondo for The New York Times

Nick Vecchiarello, 16, of Glen Ridge, N.J., finds the patterns in a LearningRx game.

"Do you see it?" Ms. Duch asks encouragingly.

"Oh, man," mutters Nick, his eyes shifting among the cards, looking for patterns.

Across the room, Nathan Veloric, 23, studies a list of numbers, looking for any two in a row that add up to nine. With tight-lipped determination, he scrawls a circle around one pair as his trainer holds a stopwatch to time him. Halfway through the 50 seconds allotted to complete the exercise, a ruckus comes from the center of the room.

"Nathan's here!" shouts Vanessa Maia, another trainer. Approaching him with a teasing grin, she claps her hands like an annoying little sister. "Distraction!" she shouts. "Distraction!"

There is purpose behind the silliness. Ms. Maia is challenging the trainees to stay focused on their tasks in the face of whatever distractions may be out there, whether Twitter feeds, the latest Tumblr posting or old-fashioned classroom commotion.

On this Wednesday evening at the Upper Montclair, N.J., outlet of LearningRx, a chain of 83 "brain training" franchises across the United States, the goal is to improve cognitive skills. LearningRx is one of a growing number of such commercial services — some online, others offered by psychologists. Unlike traditional tutoring services that seek to help students master a subject, brain training purports to enhance comprehension and the ability to analyze and mentally manipulate concepts, images, sounds and instructions. In a word, it seeks to make students smarter.

"We measure every student pre- and post-training with a version of the Woodcock-Johnson general intelligence test," said Ken Gibson, who began franchising LearningRx centers in 2003, and has data on more than 30,000 of the nearly 50,000 students who have been trained. "The average gain on I.Q. is 15 points after 24 weeks of training, and 20 points in less than 32 weeks."

The three other large cognitive training services — Lumosity, Cogmed and Posit Science — dance around the question of whether they truly raise I.Q. but do assert that they improve cognitive performance.

"Your brain, just brighter," is the slogan of Lumosity, an online company that now has some 25 million registered members. According to its Web site, "Our users have reported profound benefits that include: clearer and quicker thinking; faster problem-solving skills; increased alertness and awareness; better concentration at work or while driving; sharper memory for names, numbers and directions."

Those results are achieved, the companies say, by repurposing cognitive tasks initially developed by psychologists as tests of mental abilities. With technical names like the antisaccade, the N-back and the complex working memory span task, the exercises are dressed up as games that become increasingly difficult as students gain mastery.

Conceived to appeal to adults, especially baby boomers looking to stanch the effects of aging, Lumosity now draws one-quarter of its audience from students between the ages of 11 and 21, according to Michael Scanlon, the company's scientific director. "I was taken aback that so much of our user base is so young," he said. "The particular audience I had in mind at the earliest stages of the company was my mother." In response to requests from schoolteachers, the fee is now waived — $15 a month — for students in their classrooms. More than 1,000 teachers and 10,000 students have enrolled this year, Mr. Scanlon said.

For the one-on-one training at LearningRx, fees are decidedly higher, from about $80 to $90 an hour in Upper Montclair. The students come with learning disabilities, with grades they want to improve in a competitive academic environment, all with hopes of just being sharper.

TAYLOR WEBSTER, 16, trains daily for lacrosse with a personal coach. "She has natural athletic ability," said her mother, Samantha Newman-Webster. "But it's really through her training that she has been able to achieve to the point where she's being sought out by college recruiters." Would brain training, the family wondered, do for her grades what physical training did for her lacrosse game?

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Pennsylvania Omitted Poison Data in Water Report

PHILADELPHIA — Pennsylvania officials reported incomplete test results that omitted data on some toxic metals that were found in drinking water taken from a private well near a natural gas drilling site, according to legal documents released this week.

The documents were part of a lawsuit claiming that natural gas extraction through a method known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, and storage of the resulting wastewater at a site in southwestern Pennsylvania has contaminated drinking water and sickened seven plaintiffs who live nearby.

In a deposition, a scientist for the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection testified that her laboratory tested for a range of metals but reported results for only some of them because the department's oil and gas division had not requested results from the full range of tests.

The scientist, Taru Upadhyay, the technical director of the department's Bureau of Laboratories, said the metals found in the water sample but not reported to either the oil and gas division or to the homeowner who requested the tests, included copper, nickel, zinc and titanium, all of which may damage the health of people exposed to them, according to the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry.

Ms. Upadhyay said that the bureau did not arbitrarily decide to withhold those results. "It was not requested by our client for that particular test, so we did — it is not on our final report," she said in a deposition on Sept. 26.

Another state environmental official, John Carson, a water quality specialist, testified in a separate deposition that he had received no training in what metals are found in the fluid used in fracking. Critics say that fracking contaminates public water supplies.

The defendants include Range Resources, a leading developer of natural gas in Pennsylvania, and 16 other companies serving the gas industry.

Kendra Smith, a lawyer for Loren Kiskadden, whose water was tested by the Environmental Protection Department, contended that the department purposely avoided reporting the full results of its tests of Mr. Kiskadden's water in June 2011 and January 2012, after using a method established by the federal Environmental Protection Agency known as 200.7. The method tests for 24 metals, only eight of which were reported, Ms. Smith said.

"Testimony of Ms. Taru Upadhyay was quite alarming," Ms. Smith wrote Thursday in a letter to Michael Krancer, the state environmental secretary. "She revealed what can only be characterized as a deliberate procedure" by the oil and gas division and the Bureau of Laboratories "to withhold critical water testing results."

Kevin Sunday, a spokesman for the department, said Ms. Smith had failed to substantiate her "outrageous contention" that the department omitted key markers in tests for substances that typically occur in water samples from drilling in the Marcellus Shale, a rock formation rich in natural gas.

"The battery of analyses we order during investigations are thorough and give us the results we need to make sound determinations, which we fully stand behind," he said in a statement.

Mr. Sunday said oil and gas division officials wanted to see only the results they deemed relevant to determining whether drinking water was being contaminated by Marcellus Shale gas drilling and production. The remaining metals were present in concentrations that were below federal standards for safe drinking water or had no such standards attached to them, and so were seen as not being useful to the analysis of whether gas drilling was affecting ground water, he said.

Ms. Smith noted that the metals not reported in Mr. Kiskadden's tests have been identified by industry studies as being found as contaminants in water produced from oil and gas operations.

In the suit, filed in the Washington County Court of Common Pleas in May, Mr. Kiskadden lists health complaints — including nausea, bone pain, breathing difficulties and severe headaches — that he says are consistent with exposure to "hazardous chemicals and gases through air and water."

Toxicology tests on Mr. Kiskadden and the other six plaintiffs who live within a mile of a Range Resources drill site and wastewater pond in Amwell Township have found the presence of toluene, benzene and arsenic in their bodies, according to the complaint.

The Amwell site is among those the E.P.A. is using in its national investigation into whether fracking affects groundwater and drinking water.

Companies like Range Resources insist that chemicals used in fracking cannot enter public water sources because they are insulated from aquifers by multilayered steel and concrete casings and are deployed a mile or more underground beneath thousands of feet of impervious rock.

State Representative Jesse J. White, a Democrat who represents part of Washington County, accused the Environmental Protection Department of manipulating water tests to hide what he called "adverse results" from gas-drilling operations.

Range Resources did not return calls seeking comment, but the Marcellus Shale Coalition, an industry group, said that the state lab had been endorsed as "well-managed, efficient and highly functional" by the Association of Public Health Laboratories.

John Schwartz contributed reporting from New York.

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Bloomberg Endorses Obama, Citing Climate Change

Mr. Bloomberg, a political independent in his third term leading New York City, has been sharply critical of Mr. Obama, a Democrat, and Mitt Romney, the president's Republican rival, saying that both men had failed to candidly confront the problems afflicting the nation. But he said he had decided over the past several days that Mr. Obama was the better candidate to tackle the global climate change that he believes might have contributed to the violent storm, which took the lives of at least 38 New Yorkers and caused billions of dollars in damage.

"The devastation that Hurricane Sandy brought to New York City and much of the Northeast — in lost lives, lost homes and lost business — brought the stakes of next Tuesday's presidential election into sharp relief," Mr. Bloomberg wrote in an editorial for Bloomberg View.

"Our climate is changing," he wrote. "And while the increase in extreme weather we have experienced in New York City and around the world may or may not be the result of it, the risk that it may be — given the devastation it is wreaking — should be enough to compel all elected leaders to take immediate action."

Mr. Bloomberg's endorsement is another indication that Hurricane Sandy has influenced the presidential campaign. The storm and the destruction it left in its wake have dominated news coverage, transfixing the nation and prompting the candidates to halt their campaigning briefly.

The announcement is also the latest in a series of steps Mr. Bloomberg has taken in a bid to assert his influence nationally as his final term as mayor enters its twilight — and after he appears to have abandoned his own hopes of one day becoming president.

Last month, the mayor said that he was creating his own "super PAC" to support candidates from either party, as well as independents, who he believes are devoted to his brand of nonideological problem solving, and he has increasingly used his personal wealth and the bully pulpit of his office in an effort to persuade elected officials to support same-sex marriage, gun control and education reform.

The impact of Mr. Bloomberg's endorsement is unclear; his city and his state are overwhelmingly Democratic, and although he is a well-known and long-serving public official who frequently appears in the national media, his influence is difficult to measure: an ABC News/Washington Post poll conducted in December found 30 percent of Americans had a favorable view of Mr. Bloomberg, 26 percent had an unfavorable view, and many — 44 percent — had no opinion of him one way or the other.

Both the Obama and Romney campaigns had aggressively sought the mayor's endorsement, in large part because they believed he could influence independent voters around the country. Mr. Bloomberg had recently signaled he would not make an endorsement, telling reporters several weeks ago that he had decided whom he would vote for, but that he was not sure he would share that decision with the public.

John Weaver, a prominent Republican political strategist, said the timing of the mayor's endorsement was notable.

"His announcement is sandwiched between this horrific calamity and the presidential election," he noted. "So the timing could not have been more significant for him and his views."

Steve McMahon, a veteran Democratic strategist, said he believed that now that Mr. Bloomberg had come to terms with not running for the presidency, he was interested in cementing his political legacy.

"Many politicians reach the point in their careers where they have built up considerable political equity and the only question is how they use it to make a difference," he said. "In endorsing President Obama, the mayor seems to have decided to use some of his equity."

Even before the hurricane struck, Mr. Bloomberg had been concerned about climate change. He is the chairman of an organization called C40, a network of cities seeking to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions.

Yet until the storm, climate change had not been much of an issue in the presidential campaign. The topic did not come up during the three presidential debates, and the candidates have not provided detailed legislative or regulatory plans outlining their stances on the issue.

Since the hurricane, a number of elected officials have come forward, chiefly in New York, to say that they have concluded the planet is undergoing climate change, that huge storms are no longer freak occurrences but expectable reality, and that public policy must begin to prepare for the impact.

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York said Tuesday, "Anyone who says there is not a dramatic change in weather patterns I think is denying reality." Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, said Wednesday, "We're going to pay a price for the change in climate." And Representative Jerrold Nadler, Democrat of Manhattan, echoed the consensus of local officials on Thursday, saying simply, "There will be a storm of this magnitude again."

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Dying Satellites Could Lead to Shaky Weather Forecasts

WASHINGTON — The United States is facing a year or more without crucial satellites that provide invaluable data for predicting storm tracks, a result of years of mismanagement, lack of financing and delays in launching replacements, according to several recent official reviews.

The looming gap in satellite coverage, which some experts view as almost certain within the next few years, could result in shaky forecasts about storms like Hurricane Sandy, which is expected to hit the East Coast early next week.

The endangered satellites fly pole-to-pole orbits and cross the Equator in the afternoon, scanning the entire planet one strip at a time. Along with orbiters on other timetables, they are among the most effective tools used to pin down the paths of major storms about five days ahead.

All this week, forecasters have been relying on such satellites for almost all the data needed to narrow down what were at first widely divergent computer models of what Hurricane Sandy would do next: hit the coast, or veer away into the open ocean?

Right on schedule, the five-day models began to agree on the likeliest answer. By Friday afternoon, the storm's center was predicted to approach Delaware on Monday and Tuesday, with powerful winds, torrential rains and dangerous tides ranging over hundreds of miles.

New York and other states declared emergencies; the Navy ordered ships to sea to avoid damage. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York City warned that no matter where or when the storm landed, the city would not escape its effects. And from the Carolinas to New England, public safety officials were urgently advising tens of millions of residents to prepare for the worst, including the possibility of historic flooding, power failures and snow.

Experiments show that without this kind of satellite data, forecasters would have underestimated by half the huge blizzard that hit Washington in 2010.

"We cannot afford to lose any enhancement that allows us to accurately forecast any weather event coming our way," said Craig J. Craft, commissioner of emergency management for Nassau County on Long Island, where the great hurricane of 1938 killed hundreds. On Thursday, Mr. Craft was seeking more precise forecasts for Sandy and gearing up for possible evacuations of hospitals and nursing homes, as were ordered before Tropical Storm Irene last year. "Without accurate forecasts it is hard to know when to pull that trigger," he said.

Experts have grown increasingly alarmed in the past two years because the existing polar satellites are nearing or beyond their life expectancies, and the launch of the next replacement, known as J.P.S.S.-1, has slipped to 2017, probably too late to avoid a coverage gap of at least a year.

Prodded by lawmakers and auditors, the satellite program's managers are just beginning to think through alternatives when the gap occurs, but these are unlikely to avoid it.

This summer, three independent reviews of the $13 billion program — by the Commerce Department's inspector general, the Government Accountability Office, and a team of outside experts — each questioned the cost estimates for the program, criticized managers for not pinning down the designs and called for urgent remedies. The project is run by the Commerce Department's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and NASA.

The outside review team, led by A. Thomas Young, an aerospace industry leader, called the management of the program "dysfunctional."

In response, top Commerce and NOAA officials on Sept. 18 ordered what they called an urgent restructuring — just the latest overhaul of the troubled program. They streamlined the management, said they would fill major vacancies quickly and demanded immediate reports on how the agency planned to cope with the gap. They have moved quickly to nail down the specific designs of the J.P.S.S.-1's components, many of them already partly built. And they promised to quickly complete a new independent cost estimate to verify the program's budget.

Ciaran Clayton, NOAA's communications director, said in a statement that the agency's top priority was to provide timely, accurate forecasts to protect the public, and that it would continue to develop and update plans to cover any potential gap.

The under secretary of commerce responsible for NOAA, Jane Lubchenco, issued the memorandum ordering the changes. In it, she wrote that the administration had been trying all along to fix "this dysfunctional program that had become a national embarrassment due to chronic management problems."

"It is a long, sad history," said Dennis Hartmann, the chairman of a broad review of earth-observing satellite programs released in May by the National Research Council. The report projected a dismal decline in what has been a crown jewel of modern earth and atmospheric science.

The Joint Polar Satellite System also includes important sensors for studying the global climate, and these too are at risk.

But its main satellites are most notable because they put instruments to sense atmospheric moisture, temperature and the like into what is known as the "polar p.m." orbit, a passage from lower altitude that provides sharp and frequent images of global weather patterns. (Other satellites stare continuously at one part of the globe from farther off, for short-term forecasting.)

Polar satellites provide 84 percent of the data used in the main American computer model tracking Hurricane Sandy.

For years, as the accuracy of this kind of forecasting has steadily improved, NOAA's p.m. polar satellites have been a crucial factor, like the center on a basketball team.

But all the while, despite many warnings, the coverage gap has grown ever more likely.

The department told Congress this summer that it could not come up with any way to launch J.P.S.S.-1 any sooner. Kathryn D. Sullivan, assistant secretary of commerce, said it would "endeavor to maintain the launch date as much as practicable."

The Government Accountability Office, which views a gap as "almost certain," has been urging NOAA to come up with alternatives, like leaning on other commercial, military or government satellites for helpful data. But it said it would take a long time and more money to get any such jury-rigged system running.

For now, the agency is running on a stopgap bill that allows it to redirect money from other projects to the polar satellites. In approving it, Congress demanded a plan by next week showing how NOAA intended to stay on schedule and within a strict limit — about $900 million a year.

"NOAA does not have a policy to effect consistent and reliable cost estimates," the Commerce inspector general said. The outside review team said it could not tell "if the current $12.9 billion is high, low, or exactly correct."

The program's problems began a decade ago with an effort to merge military and civilian weather satellites into a single project. After its cost doubled and its schedule slipped five years, that project was sundered by the Obama administration.

As its existing satellites aged and the delays mounted, NOAA finally put a new model named Suomi into orbit a year ago that now helps bridge the gap until the next launchings, in 2017 and in 2022 — two and four years late, respectively.

But there are lingering concerns that technical glitches have shortened Suomi's useful lifetime, perhaps to just three years. Predicting a satellite's lifetime is like trying to guess when a light bulb will go out. The most likely timing of a gap in coverage is between 2016 and 2018, according to the best official estimates.

That would "threaten life and property," the independent review team warned.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: October 29, 2012

An earlier version of this article misstated the name of one of the government agencies running the project. It is the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, not the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency.

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Friction Between Wolf Hunters and Protectors Rises

Narayan Mahon for The New York Times

Nancy Jo Dowler, the president of the Timber Wolf Preservation Society, with Comet.

GREENDALE, Wis. — When people like Nancy Jo Dowler started raising wolves here decades ago, the animals were rare in Wisconsin and nearly extinct across the country.

Now the president of the Timber Wolf Preservation Society, Ms. Dowler, 66, cares for five full-grown purebreds. She bottle-fed them as pups and howls with them at passing sirens. The other day she gave one breath mints through a hole in the fence, passing it directly from her lips to his.

Hers seems a fairy tale world compared with the legal dogfights occurring beyond these kennels. Out there, Wisconsin is three weeks into its first wolf-hunting season, sanctioned by the State Legislature in April. Minnesota is scheduled to begin its first registered wolf hunt this weekend.

The legalization of wolf hunting in both states was devised to manage a rebounding wolf population after the federal government stopped listing the species as endangered in the region last year. Both have drawn lawsuits from local and national animal rights groups that fear the undoing of nearly four decades of work to restore a healthy number of wolves.

"We've spent a lot as a nation to protect them," said Wayne Pacelle, president of the Humane Society of the United States, which in October announced a lawsuit against the federal Fish and Wildlife Service to restore protections for wolves. "These plans in Wisconsin and Minnesota are draconian, severe and unwarranted, and we think they may jeopardize the health and viability of this population."

Since the wolf hunt began last month, at least 42 have been killed in Wisconsin. All told, officials expect 600 wolves will die at the hands of hunters and trappers in the two states before spring.

Wolves were once so numerous in the United States that ranchers and government agencies paid people to kill them. By the time the Endangered Species Act began protecting wolves in 1973, they were nearing extinction in the lower 48 states. Today, wolf numbers have grown to 4,000 and exceeded recovery goals in the western Great Lakes area, according to federal estimates.

But some of those packs have started to cause problems again for ranchers in northern Wisconsin and have cost the state hundreds of thousands of dollars in livestock reimbursement payments, said officials at the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources. "Without controls, what we've seen in the state is a feeling of needing to take it into their own hands for folks that are frustrated," said Kurt Thiede, head of the wildlife management program for the agency.

After the Wisconsin Legislature approved the wolf hunt, which ends Feb. 28, more than 20,000 people applied for the required license. The state awarded 1,160 permits and capped this year's harvest at 201 kills, or roughly a quarter of its current wolf population.

In Minnesota, about 3,600 licenses were available to hunt up to 400 wolves, which would reduce the state's numbers by about 15 percent.

"There ain't too many people that have one hanging in their living room," said Timothy Mueller, a hunter from Silver Cliff, Wis. He, like others with a wolf license, was waiting for winter because pelts will be thicker and the snow will make it easier to track the animals.

Yet some hunters who once proudly talked about the rare opportunity would now rather keep their adventures private. A number declined to speak about the controversy because of reported threats made against a hunter who was among the first to register his kill with the state.

"There are a lot of the claims about how easy this is and how this is senseless slaughter," said Scott Meyer, a lobbyist for the United Sportsmen of Wisconsin. "When you see the terrain and the geographies of everything, you understand that the advantage is toward the wolf."

Animal rights groups have little sympathy for the hunters. They argue that the state kill quotas do not properly account for other ways that wolves can die, like poaching and vehicular collisions and the killing of the animals by farmers and ranchers protecting their livestock. Those additional causes, they say, could put the animals at risk again.

On Oct. 15, the day Wisconsin's wolf-hunting season began, two national groups — the Humane Society and the Fund for Animals — filed a 60-day notice of their intent to sue the federal government to restore wolf protections.

In addition, Wisconsin humane groups have filed a lawsuit to prohibit the use of dogs for hunting wolves, calling it cruel. Minnesota advocates also took legal action against their state in an attempt to stop its hunt, which lasts from Nov. 3 to Jan. 31. And Minnesota's Chippewa tribes have banned wolf hunting and trapping on its reservation lands.

"The whole balance of nature, they don't want to hear any of that," said Ms. Dowler, criticizing hunters for killing the animals she has devoted years to protect. "People absolutely love them or they absolutely hate them. There are few people in the middle."

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Green Blog: Obama and Christie Survey New Jersey Damage

By JULIE PACE Associated Press October 31, 2012 2:36PM

Updated: October 31, 2012 4:15PM

BRIGANTINE, N.J. — President Barack Obama inspected the devastation from Sandy on Wednesday, flying high over flooded neighborhoods, sand-strewn streets and a burning fire that charred homes along the New Jersey coastline.

With Election Day less than a week away, Obama's visit to view the aftermath of the rare autumn storm was layered with political implications. The president's tour guide was New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a Republican and top supporter of GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney who joined Obama on a Marine One helicopter ride over the region.Obama told New Jersey residents devastated by the massive storm that "we're going to be here for the long haul."

At a community center where people have taken shelter, Obama said one of his top priorities is getting power back on.

Christie said it was "really important" to have the president of the United States in New Jersey.

To the chagrin of some Republicans, Christie has lavished praise on Obama for his efforts in helping states deal with the storm.

Even though politics infuse every moment in the final week before Election Day, the White House sought to focus attention on the storm, an event that has given Obama an opportunity to project presidential leadership in the final days of the tightly contested White House race.

White House spokesman Jay Carney said there were no political motivations behind Obama's decision to join his supporter's rival Wednesday.

"This is not a time for politics," Carney said. "The president appreciates the efforts of governors, state and local officials across the various states that were affected by the storm, regardless of political party."

During the helicopter tour, Obama and Christie saw a carnival and a large pier that had been damaged, along with flattened houses and fragments of wood scattered throughout neighborhoods. Parts of the New Jersey shore's famed boardwalk was missing in sections and in one area, a fire was still burning and appeared to have taken out about eight homes.

As Obama and Christie flew over Point Pleasant Beach, sand and water could be seen covering several blocks of the community. But the president got a reminder of next week's election: someone had written "ROMNEY" in large letters in the sand at the north end of the beach.

Wednesday marked Obama's third straight day off the campaign trail. He canceled rallies across four battleground states and retreated to the White House to oversee the government's storm response. Obama stopped by FEMA headquarters in Washington before heading to New Jersey.

Obama planned to return to the campaign trail Thursday, with stops planned in Green Bay, Wis., Las Vegas and Boulder, Colo. He planned to be on the road campaigning every day through the Nov. 6 election.

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Scientists Unsure if Climate Change Is to Blame for Hurricane Sandy

Marcus Yam for The New York Times

The water rose at Battery Park. Scientists said they did not know for sure if Hurricane Sandy could be tied directly to climate change, a question on the minds of many along the storm's path. More Photos »

From the darkened living rooms of Lower Manhattan to the wave-battered shores of Lake Michigan, the question is occurring to millions of people at once: Did the enormous scale and damage from Hurricane Sandy have anything to do with climate change?

Hesitantly, climate scientists offered an answer this week that is likely to satisfy no one, themselves included. They simply do not know for sure if the storm was caused or made worse by human-induced global warming.

They do know, however, that the resulting storm surge along the Atlantic coast was almost certainly intensified by decades of sea-level rise linked to human emissions of greenhouse gases. And they emphasized that Hurricane Sandy, whatever its causes, should be seen as a foretaste of trouble to come as the seas rise faster, the risks of climate change accumulate and the political system fails to respond.

"We're changing the environment — it's very clear," said Thomas R. Knutson, a research meteorologist with the government's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, N.J. "We're changing global temperature, we're changing atmospheric moisture, we're changing a lot of things. Humans are running this experiment, and we're not quite sure how it's going to turn out."

By the time Hurricane Sandy hit the Northeast coast on Monday, upending lives across the Eastern half of the country, it had become a freakish hybrid of a large, late-season hurricane and a winter storm more typical of the middle latitudes. Though by no means unprecedented, that type of hybrid storm is rare enough that scientists have not studied whether it is likely to become more common in a warming climate.

"My profession hasn't done its homework," said Kerry A. Emanuel, a climate scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "I think there's going to be a ton of papers that come out of this, but it's going to take a couple of years."

Scientists note that a warmer atmosphere can hold more water vapor, which in principle supplies more energy for storms of all types. The statistics seem to show that certain types of weather extremes, notably heat waves and heavy downpours, are becoming more common.

But how those general principles will influence hurricanes has long been a murky and contentious area of climate science. Most scientists expect that the number of Atlantic hurricanes will actually stay steady or decline in coming decades as the climate warms, but that the proportion of intense, damaging storms is likely to rise.

The experts differ sharply on whether such a rise can already be detected in hurricane statistics. Recent decades seem to show an increase in hurricane strength, but hurricanes tend to rise and fall in a recurring cycle over time, so it is possible that natural variability accounts for the recent trends.

Jeff Masters, a meteorologist and founder of a popular Web site, Weather Underground, suspects some kind of shift is under way. The number of hurricanes and tropical storms over the past three years has been higher than average, with 19 named storms in both 2010 and 2011 and 19 so far this hurricane season, which ends Nov. 30. According to the National Hurricane Center there are, on average, 12 named storms each season.

"The climatology seems to have changed," Dr. Masters said. "We're getting these very strange, very large storms with very low central pressures that don't have that much wind at the surface."

Hurricanes draw their energy from warm waters in the top layer of the ocean. And several scientists pointed out this week that parts of the western Atlantic were remarkably warm for late October as Hurricane Sandy passed over, as much as 5 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than normal for this time of year.

Kevin E. Trenberth, a scientist with the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., said that natural variability probably accounted for most of that temperature extreme. But, he added, human-induced global warming has raised the overall temperature of the ocean surface by about one degree Fahrenheit since the 1970s. So global warming probably contributed a notable fraction of the energy on which the storm thrived — maybe as much as 10 percent, he said.

Dr. Trenberth said that many of Sandy's odd features, including its large scale, derived from its origin as a merger of two weather systems that converged in the western Atlantic.

"My view is that a lot of this is chance," he said. "A hybrid storm is certainly one which is always in the cards, and it's one we've always worried about."

Winds knocked out power as far west as Michigan. But the most serious damage, including the flooding of New York's subway tunnels and the broad destruction along the Jersey Shore, came as the storm pushed roiling ocean waters onto land, a phenomenon known as storm surge. The surge set records in some places, including the Battery in Lower Manhattan.

Globally, the ocean rose about eight inches in the last century, and the rate seems to have accelerated to about a foot a century.

Scientists say most of the rise is a direct consequence of human-induced climate change. Ocean water expands when it warms, accounting for some of the rise, and land ice is melting worldwide, dumping extra water into the ocean. Scientists say they believe the rate will accelerate further, so that the total increase by the end of this century could exceed three feet.

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In Storm’s Wake, Rescues, Looting, and a Rising Death Toll

Doug Mills/The New York Times

In New Jersey, where flooding destroyed large parts of areas like Hoboken and Mantoloking, above, over two million people were without power on Wednesday. More Photos »

New York faced the reality of life after Hurricane Sandy on Wednesday: horror in still-waterlogged neighborhoods, where rescue workers pulled bodies from wreckage, and exasperation elsewhere as more than 3.75 million people entered a third day without electricity.

The storm was blamed for more than 70 deaths in the United States, including 24 in New York City, 8 in New Jersey and 4 in Connecticut. And Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said initial damage estimates "project up to $6 billion in lost economic revenue" in New York State.

The death toll seemed certain to rise as rescuers checked basements that had flooded, trapping homeowners inside. The wall of water driven ashore by the storm even flooded three police stations, two in Brooklyn and one in the Rockaway section of Queens.

Paul J. Browne, the chief spokesman for the Police Department, said a steamfitter was rescued from one station house as water crashed in. The steamfitter, whom he identified as Kevin Hunter, had been working in the boiler room, two levels below the first floor, trying to shut off steam pipes before the surge of cold water rolled in.

But Mr. Hunter's leg became caught, and he was "completely submerged underwater, unable to get free," Mr. Browne said in an e-mail. Another steamfitter, Anthony DiMaggio, sought help, and he and Lt. Peter O'Neill freed his leg and carried him out in chest-high water. With help from other officers, "they literally swam Hunter to Neptune Avenue, where the water wasn't as high," Mr. Browne said.

Eventually they loaded him onto a city bus that carried them out of the flooded area, and later into an ambulance that took him to Maimonides Hospital. He was treated for cuts, muscle strains and hypothermia.

Fifteen people in the Far Rockaway section of Queens and nine in Coney Island were charged with burglary and other offenses in connection with looting at stores. Among them was a 29-year-old woman who faced a weapons charge "after the safe she was carrying from a store was found to contain a firearm," Mr. Browne said.

For those who did not have basements that flooded or buildings that slipped off their foundations, there were lines at the gasoline stations that have power to pump fuel for generators and for cars. In New Jersey, Gov. Chris Christie's office warned drivers to be careful because lines were so long that they had stretched onto the Garden State Parkway and the New Jersey Turnpike. One Twitter feed that had been following the hurricane on the Jersey Shore began sending out updates about where to buy gas.

A wide stretch of Lower Manhattan remained dark, as did the Jersey Shore, waterfront neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Queens, and most of Long Island.

But the first section of Manhattan that lost power on Monday night, after an explosion and fire at a substation on East 14th Street, had had its lights turned back on, a Consolidated Edison executive said. Doing that restored power to about 2,000 of more than 220,000 customers below 39th Steet in Manhattan. The rest will probably have to wait until Friday or Saturday, said John Miksad, Con Ed's senior vice president for electric operations.

Power also returned to the Brighton Beach section of Brooklyn. But repairing all of the downed wires in other boroughs and in Westchester County could take another week, Mr. Miksad said.

In New Jersey, executives at Public Service Electric and Gas Company said 900,000 customers were still without power, down from a peak of 1.7 million on Tuesday. Some of the company's main lines, carrying power to substations for local distribution, still needed to be repaired, officials said. But they said electricity was on again in Newark, Elizabeth and parts of Jersey City, and they expected to have all power restored by Nov. 9.

Another big utility, Jersey Central Power and Light, said nearly 950,000 customers did not have electricity. About half were in Monmouth and Ocean Counties along the shore.

Connecticut Light and Power reported that more than 318,000 customers were out, including about two-thirds of its customers in Greenwich and New Canaan and 9 out of 10 in Weston.

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Green Blog: Did Global Warming Contribute to Hurricane Sandy's Devastation?

Was the bizarre storm called Sandy a product, in whole or in part, of human-induced climate change?

That may not be a top-of-mind issue for the millions of people who will spend coming weeks recovering from the damage. But it is an important scientific question, one whose answers could shed light not just on why this storm happened but also on what to expect in the future.

The first thing to say is that climate scientists are just not in a good position to answer it yet.

Some of them are already offering preliminary speculations, true, but a detailed understanding of the anatomy and causes of the storm will take months, at least. In past major climate events, like the Russian heat wave and Pakistani floods of 2010, thorough analysis has taken years — and still failed to produce unanimity about the causes.

But in interviews on Tuesday, several climate scientists made some initial points. A likely contributor to the intensity of Sandy, they said, was that surface temperatures in the western Atlantic Ocean were remarkably high just ahead of the storm — in places, about five degrees Fahrenheit higher than normal for this time of year. In fact, part of the ocean was warmer than it would normally be in September, when accumulated summer heat tends to peak.

Kevin E. Trenberth, a scientist with the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., said that natural variability very likely accounted for the bulk of that temperature extreme. And many of Sandy's odd features derived from its origin as a "hybrid" storm — a merger of several weather systems, including a hurricane and a midlatitude storm that had earlier dumped snow in Colorado.

"My view is that a lot of this is chance," Dr. Trenberth said. "It relates to weather, and the juxtaposition of weather systems. A hybrid storm is certainly one which is always in the cards and it's one we've always worried about."

But, he added, human-induced global warming has been raising the overall temperature of the surface ocean, by about one degree Fahrenheit since the 1970s. So global warming very likely contributed a notable fraction of the energy on which the storm thrived — perhaps as much as 10 percent, he said.

Other scientists are looking at this year's historic loss of sea ice in the Arctic as a potential contributor to the track of Sandy, and possibly to the severity of the storm.

Summer sea ice in the Arctic has fallen by roughly half since the late 1970s, a change most climate scientists believe has been caused largely by human-induced warming. A large camp of experts, Dr. Trenberth among them, believe the weather effects have mostly been confined to the Arctic Ocean and surrounding land areas.

But some published research suggests the consequences extend much farther. The idea is that the loss of sea ice is altering the flow of the atmosphere enough to heighten the risk of severe weather in midlatitude regions like the United States.

In articles like this one, I have cited the work of Jennifer A. Francis, a Rutgers University climate scientist who is a leading proponent of this view. My colleague on the opinion side of The Times, Andrew Revkin, posted an analysis from Dr. Francis this week in which she noted that an atmospheric blocking pattern over Greenland — possibly linked, in her view, to the loss of sea ice in the nearby Arctic Ocean — had helped force the storm to make a left turn into the United States mainland.

"While it's impossible to say how this scenario might have unfolded if sea-ice had been as extensive as it was in the 1980s, the situation at hand is completely consistent with what I'd expect to see happen more often as a result of unabated warming and especially the amplification of that warming in the Arctic," Dr. Francis wrote.

Although Sandy began as a hurricane, drawing strength from evaporation at the warm ocean surface, scientists noted that by the end it was also pulling energy from a second source: the sharp differences in atmospheric temperature and pressure that normally drive winter storms.

Kerry A. Emanuel, a leading climate scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, pointed out that little analysis had been done of whether this type of storm might become more frequent or intense as the earth warms in the coming century.

"The only honest answer for hybrid events is that we don't quite know what to expect with those," Dr. Emanuel said. "My profession hasn't done its homework."

That is a sharp contrast with the state of knowledge involving hurricanes. Extensive computer modeling has suggested that the number of Atlantic hurricanes will stay the same or even decrease with global warming, but that the intensity of the storms that do occur is likely to increase. Dr. Emanuel predicted that Sandy would set off a scientific rush to perform the same kind of modeling for hybrid storms.

"I think there's going to be a ton of papers that come out of this, but it's going to take a couple of years," he said.

Scientists don't need fancy computer modeling to know that the biggest problem seen during Hurricane Sandy will become worse in the future: storm surge.

The ocean is rising relentlessly, and scientists say this is a direct consequence of global warming. Warm water expands, just as warm air does, and the warming of the ocean is one factor behind the rise. Another is that land ice the world over is starting to melt as the climate grows warmer, dumping extra water into the ocean.

Over all, the ocean rose about eight inches in the last century. The rate appears to have accelerated recently, to about a foot per century, and some scientists think it will accelerate further, so that the rise between now and the end of the century could exceed three feet. The problem will be exacerbated in places where land is also sinking, such as the mid-Atlantic region of the United States and southern Louisiana.

The likely effect, Dr. Emanuel said, is that coastal flooding on a scale that once happened only once or twice per century — the scale of Sandy, in other words — will become much more commonplace within the coming decades.

"There's a reason why we build houses as far back from the beach and as high up as we do," Dr. Emanuel said. "Sea-level rise is putting our built structures closer to the water line, in effect."

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