Dodging Disaster
Weather disasters inflicted $145 billion in damages in the U.S. last year. The Northeast escaped largely unscathed, but that could change at any moment. More than 40 percent of Americans live in counties hit...
Category: Coastal Issues
‘All Other Life Exists within Their Shelter’
Along a stretch of shore I routinely visit, chestnut-gold rockweed and barnacle-encrusted rocks form a natural collage that is quintessential Maine. The sprawling rockweed encompasses two species: willowy manes of knotted wrack and the...
Wind: The Overlooked Wild Card in Climate Change
The 1,157 wildfires that occurred in Maine during 2020 included a fire at Baxter State Park that was controlled after 45 acres had burned. Since wind-driven fires tend to be most damaging,wind speeds are...
Stormy Forecast: Preparing Maine for Climate-fueled Winds and Flooding
We’re in one of the most active hurricane seasons ever recorded, with two months remaining. For only the second time, the 21 preselected names for storms ran out, leaving meteorologists to label the remainder...
Glacial Melt and Rising Seas
Corks. Plugs. Floodgates. The metaphors used to characterize two glaciers at the edge of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) – Thwaites and Pine Island – are tame relative to the scale of these...
Reshaping the Energy Landscape for Resilience
During Hurricane Sandy in 2012, Hoboken, New Jersey “literally became an island,” recalled its mayor at the time, Dawn Zimmer, during a recent talk she gave in Maine. The city was 80 percent submerged,...
Planning amid Climate Instability
A recent report by the University of Maine Climate Change Institute offers a vivid reminder not to overlook the power of ecological connections. Clear links, like lobster populations responding to warming sea water, are...
Shifting Baselines
“Nature has no hope in the absence of history.” Carl Safina in Shifting Baselines: The Past and the Future of Ocean Fisheries We face a paradoxical bind, needing simultaneously to look backward and...
