Town hall meeting to consider frightening question: What if Sandy had hit Massachusetts?

By Globe Staff

In the days before Hurricane Sandy hammered the East Coast, National Weather Service forecasters in Taunton worried that it might hit Massachusetts. Some forecasting models indicated that it could make a direct hit here.

That did not happen. The storm swerved to the west and devastated areas of New York and New Jersey, while simply grazing Massachusetts. But what happened there has raised a frightening question: What if the storm had done what the computer models suggested and zeroed in on the Bay State?

US Representative Ed Markey’s office says that Sandy proved that such an event is no longer the fanciful plot of a disaster movie but the current reality of the world’s weather driven by climate change.

Markey’s office says he will join this weekend with climate scientists and activists at a town hall meeting at Faneuil Hall in Boston to talk about the potentially catastrophic effects that unchecked global warming could have on Boston, New England, and the world.

Markey’s office noted in a statement this week that if Sandy had hit here, Faneuil Hall, the site of the town hall meeting, and the TD Garden would have had “waves lapping against their doors.”

The event is jointly sponsored by the Environmental League of Massachusetts and the Union of Concerned Scientists. It begins at 11 a.m. Sunday at Faneuil Hall.