Climate Change Is Not Just Happening Far Away

By Alan Singer

Enough about Trump and I.C.E. In my next few blogs, I discuss a different type of ice.

Climate change is melting the Earth’s ice caps, defrosting Siberia, leading to more deadly forest fires and hurricanes, and making flooding more severe. These may seem like distant events, but climate change is also having more local impacts on the New York metropolitan area.

The destabilization of the atmospheric Jet Stream is allowing frigid arctic air from the polar vortex that is normally trapped around the North Pole to plunge much of the United States into a deep freeze. Paradoxically, the mounds of greying snow piled on New York City streets is a result of global warming.

Long Island, which includes two of the five New York boroughs and two counties, Nassau and Suffolk, east of the city, is especially vulnerable. During the past three decades, Suffolk County had the most severe weather events in New York State. Overall, residents of Nassau and Suffolk Counties have filed and received over $3 billion in flood insurance claims since the mid-1970s. Many Long Island south shore communities were devastated by Hurricane Sandy in 2012, but thirteen years later the destruction and displacement have largely been forgotten.

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Source: Daily Kos

Image source: clipart-library.com

Alan Singer is a historian and teacher educator at Hofstra University, Hempstead, New York. His most recent books are Social Studies for Secondary Schools, 5th edition (Routledge, 2024) and Class-Conscious Coal Miners (SUNY Press, 2024). Blogs, tweets, essays, interviews, and e-blasts present his views and not those of Hofstra University.