Is it the Delaware? Is it the Schuylkill? No, it’s what the Navy Yard looks like after a major storm (the Delaware is on the other side of that fence). Photo courtesy of @navyyardphila

It took one of the worst hurricanes the Northeast Corridor’s ever endured to get today’s Wonky Wednesday terms into the mainstream discussion about the upcoming presidential election. Granted, there’s a lot of topics of interest to us that we’ve heard next to nothing about in this election cycle – infrastructure, transportation, CITIES – but an event like this makes the omitting (o-MITT-ing?) of these topics from high-level discussions all the more flabbergasting.

For those of you living under a rock – and we hope in all seriousness that it was a well-insulated, flood-proof rock nowhere near a coast line – most folks with credentials in this sort of thing agree that although Sandy did not necessarily occur because of climate change, weather events like Sandy will only get worse as the slow and sometimes-all-too-easy to ignore effects of climate change accumulate: rising water levels, warmer temperatures in water and air that bring added moisture to fuel such storms…things like that.

At the end of the day, cause doesn’t really matter when it comes to the very real and present challenge of responding to these storms. Whether it’s all our fault for behaving the way we do in our urbanized and industrialized world, or Mother Nature deciding to warm things up a bit for the heck of it, or a higher power punishing us for our sins, the trend exists. READ MORE