More than 200,000 people are expect to converge on Central Park West in New York city on Sunday for the People’s Climate March. At least 22 of them will be from the Vineyard. Buses traveling to the march from Cape Cod are already full with a wait list.
Have you been noticing the reports since Hurricane Sandy, consistently, nearly every week, all over the world — of very extreme weather events and conditions? If you’ve been denying yourself the opportunity to keep up on the details, now would be a good time to break the habit.
As rapid erosion continues to threaten the Gay Head Light, a possible solution emerged this week to help mitigate the situation as the town embarks on a complicated, longer-term project to move the lighthouse.
In following the news coverage of Hurricane Sandy, I was struck by a strange reversal in reporting from before and after the storm. In the days leading up to landfall, the effect of climate change on the likelihood, strength or impacts of the storm was largely ignored; in accounts of the damage post-Sandy, the subject of climate change has been routinely raised.
To anyone who has spent a languid summer afternoon tumbling in the waves on South Beach or watched the earth’s closest star dip into the horizon at Menemsha, the ocean can seem eternal and unchanging. But scientists are increasingly discovering that human activity is transforming what was once thought to be an invulnerable resource. The ocean is getting warmer, more acidic, louder and filled with the detritus of civilization. What effect these changes will have on the ocean’s inhabitants in the decades to come is unclear.
As drastic erosion continues to eat away at Chilmark’s south shore, town officials this week expressed grave concern for public safety and impeded access to Lucy Vincent and Squibnocket beaches. The Chilmark board of selectmen also approved a study for the extreme Upper Chilmark Pond, known as Upper Upper Chilmark Pond to some, for a possible dune restoration project.
When the groundhog awakens from his long winter nap tomorrow at
dawn, he will rise from his hole in the ground and think he overslept.
If he lived on the Vineyard, he'd think it was already spring.
Forsythia are in bloom, and in the past week there have been
sightings of honeybees and, in West Tisbury, a butterfly. Snow drops are
in bloom in various places from Edgartown to West Tisbury.
Following a category two hurricane or a 50-year coastal storm, Beach Road and Eastville avenue would likely be buried under water, and the only remaining access to the Martha's Vineyard Hospital in Oak Bluffs would be Temahigan Road, according to preliminary results of a risk assessment study prepared by an independent consultant.
But even under a worst-case storm scenario, the actual hospital facility would avoid major flooding, the preliminary study suggests.
Geological time mostly runs incredibly slowly, in measures of
hundreds of thousands, if not millions or billions of years. No wonder
Bob Woodruff was excited about what happened over the weekend.
