Late for the first hurricane, but not the latest
Hurricanes
The Nor’easter Sparks a Berm Boom
Threatened coastal towns in New Jersey race to build sand walls as another storm looms
Manhattan Goes Dutch: Guarding Gotham With Levees
Hurricane Sandy has a lot of serious people — including New York’s governor — calling for New York City to follow New Orleans
McKibben on Sandy: The World’s Greenest Author Talks to TIME
Bil McKibben has spent his career warning the world about the wages of climate change. Now, in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, he’s seeing his fears come true.
Flying Blind: America’s Aging Weather Satellites
Sticker Shock: What Extreme Weather Costs the U.S.
It’s not hard to imagine the damage weird weather inflicts on our planet. Hurricane Katrina, for example, obliterated coastal communities, wiped out businesses and left hundreds of dead bodies in its wake. Quantifying the cost of such a one-off (we hope) event is pretty easy too: Katrina left us with a bill of $81 billion, …
After Levee Blast, More Rough Water Ahead
In the middle of the night on Tuesday, in a hotly contested move, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers blasted open a two-mile long hole in a levee along the Mississippi River, sending the rain-swollen waterway gushing over 100,000 acres of Missouri farmland. The flooded area – sparsely populated but fertile farmland – has long been …
The Oil Has Stopped—for Now
The numbers tell the story better than anything else could: after 85 days, 16 hours and 25 minutes, oil at last stopped flowing from BP’s busted well in the Gulf of Mexico. Since the evening of April 20, when the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded, between 93.5 million and 184.3 million gallons of crude have been spilled—blowing the …
A Quick Fix for Climate Change Falls Flat
It’s always about this time of year—when the first air-sucking, clothes-wilting, soul-smothering heat wave hits a big swath of the country—that people who rarely think about climate change start to worry. Never mind that a single sweltering summer can never be traced directly to global warming. Hot weather causes even some of the …
Stormy Days for the Oil Spill?
It doesn’t take much to disrupt the jury-rigged system BP has designed to contain some of the oil spewing into the Gulf. Just a few days ago an underwater remote operated vehicle bumped into a venting system, requiring BP to remove the containment cap for about half a day—during which time oil flowed from the well virtually …