Image: GOES-13 satellite image captured on Oct. 31 at 1240 UTC. Credit: NASA GOES Project.

sciencefriday.com - November 2nd, 2012

Communities along the East Coast are reeling from the impact of Hurricane Sandy, dealing with electric outages, flooded streets, damaged sewage plants, and fractured transportation lines. Can cities rebuild stronger, more resilient infrastructure to weather the storms of the future?

(LISTEN TO STORY AT WEBSITE)

Image: Currie Wagner looks over the debris from his grandmother Betty Wagner's house, destroyed by Sandy, in New Jersey. Photograph: Julio Cortez/AP

guardian.co.uk - October 31st, 2012 - Bill McKibben

Here's a sentence I wish I hadn't written – it rolled out of my Macbook in May, part of an article for Rolling Stone that quickly went viral:

    "Say something so big finally happens (a giant hurricane swamps Manhattan, a megadrought wipes out Midwest agriculture) that even the political power of the industry is inadequate to restrain legislators, who manage to regulate carbon."

I wish I hadn't written it because the first half gives me entirely undeserved credit for prescience: I had no idea both would, in fact, happen in the next six months.

(VIEW COMPLETE ARTICLE)