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When Hurricane Irene neared New York at the end of August, the city took the unprecedented step of shutting down the entire transit system—buses, subways and commuter trains in the largest city in America. The danger was that heavy rains from Irene could cause flooding that would swamp tunnels and tracks, causing lasting damage to [...]
Maybe we should retire the term “global warming,” which makes climate change sound like a nice, pleasant bath. It’s true that climate change—caused chiefly by the rapid increase in manmade carbon emissions—will result in warmer temperatures, fewer cold days and longer and more intense heat waves. But the real damage, both economically and in human [...]
Perhaps the biggest wild card in the response to last year’s oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico was the threat of a major hurricane. The Gulf is a locus for major tropical storms (remember a little downpour called Katrina?), and any time a large storm even threatened the area of water near the spill—where [...]
As the middle of the country weathers a truly historic string of tornadoes—see TIME’s David Von Drehle’s moving story from Joplin, Mo.—another battle has opened up over climate change’s possible role in these record-breaking disasters. For many environmentalists, the twisters of 2011 are an ominous sign of things to come—and another Katrina, chance for greens [...]
There are storms and then there is what happened to the town of Sanford, North Carolina on the night of April 16. A boisterous storm system had begun in Oklahoma on April 14, bringing flash floods, tornadoes and thunderstorms from the Midwest through the Southeast, part of a massive weather system that could be felt [...]
