More dugongs (Dugong dugon) have died in Australia this year than in all of 2010. At least 90 of the marine mammals, close relatives of manatees, have starved to death off the coast of Queensland after floods destroyed the area’s sea grass, the dugong’s main source of food. Another six were killed by boats or [...]

During an eerily foreshadowing talk I attended the week before Sandy came crashing ashore, New York City’s climate resilience advisor, Leah Cohen, assured the small attending audience that PlaNYC 2030, a tentative map for the city’s sustainable growth, outlined no such plans to “buy back” developed areas in the city—even those dangerously close to the [...]

My hometown lies on a sandbar, squarely in the floodplain of the Upper Mississippi River. Winona (Minnesota) benefited from its position along the river, rapidly growing to wealth as a steamboat port and lumber town. The second railroad bridge across the Mississippi was built there, and in 1900, Winona had more millionaires per capita than [...]

“We [seem to] have a 100-year flood every two years now,” New York Governor Andrew Cuomo says he told President Barack Obama during his tour of the damage from Hurricane Sandy on Tuesday. The remark is in the spirit of what climate scientists have been saying about the rise in “extreme weather events,” sea level [...]

Take a hurricane moving up from the south. Mash in a colder storm moving in from the west. Add a ridge of high pressure extending through the atmosphere above the northeastern Atlantic Ocean and Greenland, blocking the typical flow of the jet stream. That’s the recipe for what will become “Post-Tropical Storm Sandy” or, as [...]

In an eerie coincidence, Hurricane Isaac has spun up to Category 1 strength over warm Gulf waters and is predicted to hit southeastern Louisiana—and possibly New Orleans directly—seven years to the day after Hurricane Katrina slammed the Crescent City. The tropical cyclone will likely be no stronger than a Category 2 on the Saffir-Simpson scale [...]

As Hurricane Irene trundles toward the densely populated cities of the U.S. Northeast, residents and officials in municipalities large and small have been preparing for a full-force tropical cyclone. “All implications point to this being a historic hurricane,” President Barak Obama said in a speech Friday morning. Some 50 million people along the eastern seaboard [...]

It’s not that the central and northern portions of the east coast of North America never see hurricanes. It’s just that we in the Northeast don’t see them that often. The last one was in 1999, and the last bad one was in 1938, a deadly one that caused damage  that can still be seen [...]

This Sunday, August 29, is the fifth anniversary of the day Hurricane Katrina inundated New Orleans, which touched off one of the most egregious and most publicized tragedies in modern American history. Scientific American published an article in 2001 that predicted precisely the kind of destruction the storm wrought, based on computer models of hurricane [...]

At the risk of becoming Plugged-In’s “Those crazies are at it again” correspondent, I would like to bring your attention to two noteworthy developments regarding sea level and politics, and then I hope to wash my hands of the topic — with higher sea levels making hand-washing especially convenient, of course. The first concerns the [...]