New Climate Cycle Marked by Storms, Floods & Drought
Subway tunnels built for normal weather conditions are flooded by a superstorm; roads constructed for historic temperature means are buckling under extreme heat; levees built for one-in-100-year storms are tested every few years and sometimes fail. Infrastructure built to existing building-code standards is not robust enough for an altered and changing climatic future.
"Clearly, we are not prepared," says Tom Wilbanks, a fellow at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and a coordinating lead chapter author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) fourth assessment report and other major papers on climate adaptation, including for the recent draft "National Climate Assessment" by a federal advisory committee.