The climate change issue has been virtually a non-issue during the presidential campaign — but it's primed to take a higher profile after the elections, in part due to Hurricane Sandy's horrific aftermath. At least that's the view of Shawn Lawrence Otto, one of the founders of ScienceDebate.org and author of "Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science of America."

Otto focused on climate politics during Wednesday night's installment of "Virtually Speaking Science," a talk show airing online and in the Second Life virtual world. You can hear an archived version of the hourlong program, hosted by yours truly, via the BlogTalkRadio archive or iTunes.

Hurricane Sandy already has re-energized the debate over the global effects of escalating greenhouse-gas emissions.

On one side, experts point to the fact that this season's warmer seas helped the storm keep up its strength as it moved northward, and that higher sea levels added to the strength of Sandy's storm surge. Such conditions are expected to be more common if current climate trends continue. On the other side, skeptics point out that Sandy's strength was in line with extreme storms of the past. For more on the back-and-forth over Sandy specifically, check out this posting by Columbia Journalism Review's Curtis Brainard and this one by Dot Earth's Andrew Revkin — and be sure to follow the Web links.

Otto sides with those who believe Hurricane Sandy will bring the climate debate back into the spotlight.

"I do think that, moving forward, it may be a watershed moment, so to speak," Otto told me on "Virtually Speaking Science." However, he acknowledged that the same claim could have been made for Hurricane Katrina in 2005, which didn't end up moving the dial appreciably on attitudes toward climate change.

Hurricane Sandy may not make voters more amenable to cap-and-trade schemes or a carbon tax, but it's more likely to highlight the flip side of climate policy: how to adapt to potential impacts and encourage climate-conscious innovation. More people are talking about the cost vs. benefit of storm surge barriers for the New York metro area, for example. Insurers may add disincentives for coastal development, in anticipation of higher sea levels or more frequent extreme storms. The federal government may provide more support for energy technologies that cut back on greenhouse-gas emissions.

That's basically GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney's strategy on the climate issue. In his response to ScienceDebate.org's questionnaire, he said he favored "robust government funding" for research into low-emission, high-efficiency industrial technologies. He maintained that this kind of "No Regrets" policy would benefit America "regardless of whether the risks of global warming materialize, and regardless of whether other nations take effective action."

President Barack Obama, meanwhile, has long championed the development of renewable-energy technologies as a way to cut greenhouse-gas emissions, even if such efforts have occasionally gotten him into trouble. An example of that is the controversy over Solyndra, a solar-panel company that went bankrupt after receiving more than a half-billion dollars in government-backed loans.

Otto speculates that Obama may have a freer hand to pursue climate initiatives if he wins a second term — and that post-Sandy reconstruction may serve as a rallying point for political allies.

There's some evidence this is already coming to pass: Just today, New York City's independent mayor, Michael Bloomberg, cited the climate challenge and the lessons from the superstorm as reasons for endorsing Obama.

"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 Tuesday’s presidential election into sharp relief," Bloomberg wrote. "Our climate is changing. 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 might be – given this week's devastation – should compel all elected leaders to take immediate action."

Bloomberg said Obama was taking major steps to reduce carbon emissions, while Romney abandoned "the very cap-and-trade program he once supported."

The mayor's endorsement probably won't have much impact on the vote in New York, a state that's as solidly in Obama's column as any state could be. But does it hint at a major change in the political climate?

For more food for thought, watch this archived video from a Capitol Hill debate between Obama surrogate Kevin Knobloch and Republican Mike Castle, who served two terms as Delaware governor and nine terms in Congress. The debate, titled "After Sandy: Climate Change, Science and the Next Four Years," was moderated by Otto and Climate Desk Live's Chris Mooney.

Update for 8:30 p.m. ET: The Guardian's Suzanne Goldenberg sees deep significance in Bloomberg's endorsement, suggesting that it "turned climate change from liability into a potentially winning political issue in this presidential election," and may embolden Republicans who secretly support action on the climate issue to "come out of the closet." Do you agree? Feel free to weigh in with your comments below.

More from 'Virtually Speaking Science':

• Sean Carroll on what lies beyond the Higgs boson
• Alan Stern on the Uwingu mystery space venture
• George Djorgovski on the future of immersive virtual reality
• JPL's Dave Beaty previews Curiosity's mission on Mars
• SETI Institute's Seth Shostak about aliens and UFOs
• Paul Doherty on solar eclipses and the transit of Venus
• Veronica Ann Zabala-Aliberto on spaceflight and Yuri's Night
• JPL's Dave Beaty on the search for life on Mars
• Shawn Lawrence Otto on science and politics
• Ig Nobel impresario Marc Abrahams on silly science
• Rocket scientist Robert Zubrin on Mars exploration
• Propulsion expert Marc Millis on interstellar spaceflight
• Sean Carroll on the puzzling frontiers of physics
• Rand Simberg on the private-enterprise vision for spaceflight
• Martin Hoffert on the future of energy policy
• George Djorgovski on science in virtual worlds
• Alan Stern on suborbital research and NASA's mission to Pluto
• Col. 'Coyote' Smith on the outlook for space solar power
• Tim Pickens on rocket ventures and the Google Lunar X Prize

"Virtually Speaking Science" is hosted in Second Life by the Caltech Virtual Astronomy Group. The Exploratorium's Paul Doherty will be my guest on Dec. 5 for a VSS program looking back at the year's astronomical highlights and looking ahead to 2013.

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Arcadis via AP

An artist's conception from the Dutch engineering firm Arcadis illustrates its proposal to build a barrier in the Verrazano Narrows between New York's Brooklyn borough and Staten Island, shielding the Upper New York Bay. This barrier would be supplemented by two smaller barriers, one between Staten Island and New Jersey and the other on the East River. Experts say the vast destruction wreaked by the storm surge in New York could have been prevented with a sea barrier of the type that protects major cities in Europe.

Marine scientist Malcolm Bowman has been warning since before Hurricane Katrina that the New York metro area was susceptible to a catastrophic storm surge, but the fact that superstorm Sandy proved him right doesn't make him feel any better.

"It was all predictable, and unfortunately it all happened,” Bowman told me today. "But then it got worse."

Bowman's nightmare scenario, laid out in a 2005 report, foresaw a 12-foot storm surge that devastated low-lying neighborhoods in the New York metro area. When Hurricane Sandy was approaching landfall on the New Jersey coastline on Monday, the National Hurricane Center predicted that the storm surge could amount to somewhere between 6 and 11 feet.

The tide that pushed into New York's Battery Park was higher than any of those figures: 13.7 feet in height.

The results were catastrophic: Subway and highway tunnels between Manhattan and Brooklyn were flooded. Power stations were swamped, leaving millions of people without electricity. The water washed over runways, rail yards and roads, disrupting traffic for days. Whole towns were submerged in New Jersey. Rising water levels affected operations at half a dozen nuclear power plants in the region. The estimated toll: At least 46 deaths in the United States, and an estimated $20 billion or more in property damage.

"This has been a knockout punch," Bowman said. "This is a wakeup call."

Storm surges have hit the region before — most notably with the deadly nor'easter of December 1992, and to a lesser extent with Hurricane Irene last year. But Sandy was much deadlier.

"What happened on Monday night is that the maximum surge occurred at high tide, and it also happened to be a full moon," Bowman said. "All those events came to coincide, and that's what made it so bad. If the storm had hit six hours later, it would have been low tide, and there would have been less damage. Timing is everything."

But in Bowman's view, it's not just a question of bad luck. "Climate change is real," he said. "We've had these two extreme events, two years in a row. It's time to think about levees. This is what the Europeans have done."

Bowman and his colleagues at the Stony Brook Storm Surge Research Group have been calling for the construction of a network of levees and gates that could block the gargantuan push of water that accompanies superstorms like Sandy.

The project would start with two or three storm surge barriers, modeled after the systems that have been built on the Thames River in England, or on waterways in the Netherlands. Bowman said three such systems are already protecting Stamford, Conn.; New Bedford, Mass.; and Providence, R.I.

The best locations for the New York region's first barriers would be at the Outer Barrier and across the Upper East River, Bowman said. "They would cost in the range of $5 billion or $10 billion each," he said. "That sounds like a lot of money, but you wait until you hear what it will cost to bring the city back."

Up to now, New York's response to flood threats has been to build smaller-scale barriers around facilities to make them more resilient to flooding. A multibillion-dollar project to create a storm surge defense system hasn't been on the agenda. "The city has been very polite, and they agree that in the long term it will become a necessity," Bowman said. "But for now they say, not yet. They're focusing on resilience, solutions to small problems."

That strategy will almost certainly change in the post-Sandy era. During a Tuesday news conference, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo acknowledged that it's time to upgrade the city's infrastructure for the superstorms to come.

"Going forward we are going to have to anticipate these types of extreme weather patterns," CNBC quoted him as saying. "And we have to think about how we redesign the system so that this doesn't happen again." 

That won't happen overnight.

"What has to happen is, either Congress or the city of New York needs to put in a request to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and say we need to do a feasibility study," Bowman said. "We've done it on the academic level, but now we need to bring in the corps. ... We could be studying this for the next 10 years, but we better get on with it."

More about the science of Sandy:

• Subway rats may flood NYC streets
• How Sandy turned into a superstorm
• Climate experts worry about storms to come 
• NBC News' coverage of superstorm Sandy

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.