How many of the NYC rats survived hurricane Sandy? This question has been asked in the wake of Sandy’s flooding of lower and east Manhattan. See, for example, articles in Huffington Post Green, Forbes, National Geographic, Business Insider, Mother Nature Network and NYMag. The short answer is: some rats drowned, some survived. The complicated question, [...]

For some, an unwanted reminder of Hurricane Sandy that crashed into the East Coast as megastorm of the century is a big tree uprooted, lying across the yard — If lucky, missing the house. From North Carolina to Canada trees toppled or broke off big limbs, killing or injuring people and animals, crashing into homes [...]

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 [...]

Bill McKibben, co-founder of 350.org, made a comment the other day that really captured the essence of the monster hybrid storm, Hurricane Sandy: “This thing is stitched together from elements (both) natural and unnatural.” Most elements of this storm have indeed been observed in the past without any need for invoking global climate change as [...]

Evolutionary psychologists tell us it’s human nature to search for lessons from the skies. Here is what I think Hurricane Sandy is saying to the U.S.: If you don’t hang together, you will hang separately. I feel undeservedly lucky to be in a part of New York City that has power and water in Sandy’s [...]

“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 [...]

Utility companies in the United States are good at their job – so good that Americans can largely take for granted that, when they flip a switch, their lights will come on. But, if extensive investments are not made over the coming decade, the nation might soon use “blackout” as its mot du jor. If [...]

I am here at home in Maplewood, New Jersey, four days after an angry wind whipped through the trees, sending my entire family downstairs into the living room for the night. There we huddled, tucked under covers on mattresses hauled down from higher, more exposed floors of our house while we listened to the roar [...]