As a historic set of wildfires sweeps across California, sparked by lightning and stoked by record heat and drought resulting from climate change (Mercury News, 8/19/20; Scientific American, 4/3/20), many news outlets have drawn readers’ attention to an additional problem … Continue reading
The year 2019 was, by all accounts, the year of climate awareness. To an unprecedented degree, in the three decades since scientists first warned of the imminent dangers of rising carbon emissions and the resulting global warming, we were transfixed … Continue reading
If you’ve only been following the bushfires ravaging Australia through the headlines popping up on your social media feeds — which, let’s face it, is more popular than reading newspapers these days — it’s probably been in a series of … Continue reading
New York City commuters have gotten used to bizarre delays. Falling tree limbs and trains that were invisible to controllers until a computer was rebooted are among the issues that have slowed down commutes. But visitors to Williamsburg’s Broadway station … Continue reading
Stand along the East River waterfront in the Financial District, and it quickly becomes how big a task City Hall has set for itself in protecting lower Manhattan from sea level rise. Manhattan’s southern tip is ringed by low-lying land … Continue reading
The water first rose up out of the streets in Coney Island, recalls Ida Sanoff, sometime last summer. “I was standing last summer on the corner of Mermaid Avenue and I think West 19th Street, and it hadn’t rained in … Continue reading
As you may have noticed, the news from the future is not good, not good at all. A report released earlier this month from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the global scientific panel set up by the United Nations … Continue reading
Of all the ways in which our broken planet is preparing to kill us — tropical diseases gone wild, swarms of water refugees, frozen methane rising from the inky depths to smother us in prehistoric microbe farts — the general … Continue reading
On the corner of Franklin and Varick streets in Tribeca, kitty-corner from the Ghostbusters firehouse, sits a prototype of the main weapon in the MTA’s war against water.It looks like a normal subway entrance, except the railing at the back … Continue reading
New York is a city that likes to forget it’s surrounded by water. Each spring, as the sidewalks thaw and we re-emerge, blinking, into the natural world, there are plenty of opportunities to rediscover the city’s ample waterfront: New York … Continue reading