The Virginian-Pilot
By Beth Kemler
I have friends who are survivalists. They have three months’ worth of food, water and ammo stowed in their basements. I used to think they were a little nuts. I joked that they were ready for the zombie apocalypse. After a year of completely unprecedented weather fueled by climate change, I’m starting to think they’re a little smart.
Superstorm Sandy was just the latest disaster that gained ammunition from climate change.
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After Hurricane Sandy, can we finally talk about climate change?
The Baltimore Sun
By James McGarry
The candidates won’t discuss a warming planet, but Hurricane Sandy filled in the silence
Every four years, presidential candidates tell the American people that this election is a turning point for the country. This year they might actually be right. To be sure, there are always differences between candidates. On a range of issues, from health care to tax reform, voters face a real choice about two different approaches to governing.
But the most profound turning point in this election may be the fact that the neither candidate is talking about one of the most critical issues of our time. I refer to the silence around climate change.
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Sandy Reminds Us to Harness Winds and Mitigate Their Wrath
Maryland was just hit by Hurricane Sandy, the largest storm ever recorded to hit the East Coast, but not as hard as states like New Jersey and New York:
“We all dodged a bullet on this one,” Anne Arundel County Fire Battalion Chief Steve Thompson said Tuesday from the county’s emergency operations center. “If that storm would have wiggled a little bit south, with those winds, it would have been a doozie.”
Yet, 300,000 people from Virginia to Baltimore remained without power Tuesday evening and many areas of the state experienced extensive flooding. The fishing pier on Ocean City’s iconic boardwalk is now half-gone. Sadly there were also a couple storm related deaths in Maryland as well as a number of injuries.
As we begin to rebuild, the first thing we must do is make sure everyone is safe and has what they need to survive in our state and across the country. Please donate if you can to the American Red Cross as they most certainly will need more robust funding in the coming years and decades.
Once we get back on our feet, with the metro running in DC and the subways back on track in New York City, we must immediately focus on what we can do to lessen the wrath of ever-worsening storms like Sandy. Perhaps Stephen Lacey and Joe Romm put it best when describing the link between human-caused climate change and these new super-storms:
Superstorm Sandy
Much of New Jersey, New York City and elsewhere definitely got hit very hard by Superstorm Hurricane Sandy yesterday: several feet of sand covering roads close to the ocean in Point Pleasant and probably elsewhere—50 or so homes burned down in Queens—extensive flooding of the lower Manhattan NYC subways—7 million or more customers without power—blizzard conditions in the Appalachians—and much more, without question.
I live in NJ, about 12 miles west of Manhattan. We didn’t get much rain but we did get very high winds, probably 80 mph or so, and as my wife and I huddled together on the couch last night, we held our breath more than once as the strong winds howled outside. Was a tree or a huge branch going to be uprooted or broken off onto our house or the electrical wires?
Hurricane Sandy: The worst-case scenario for New York City is unimaginable
What might Hurricane Sandy do to New York City? See excerpts below from my 2006 book The Ravaging Tide: Strange Weather, Future Katrinas, and the Coming Death of America’s Coastal Cities (Simon and Schuster/Free Press). It’s a depressing title meant to help shock us into preventing these worst-case scenarios from coming true via global climate change. But it might now be too late for parts of imperiled New York. As you read, keep in mind that as of Sunday night October 28th, the National Hurricane Center was forecasting that the storm could hit anywhere between Delaware and Rhode Island, with a surge tide as high as 11 feet in some places. Even if New York City avoids a direct strike, it is still facing a potentially “worst-case scenario” in terms of surge tides.