Scientist: Transit and roads must adjust to grim realities of climate change
Standing in front of a flood map that showed Coney Island, Red Hook and Sunset Park as danger zones, scientist Cynthia Rosenzweig told a gathering of transportation professionals on Tuesday that the sea level is rising, storms are increasing, and our mass transit and highway systems had better be prepared.
Rosenzweig, senior research scientist at the Goddard Institue for Space Studies at Columbia University, was speaking at the New York Metropolitan Transporation Council’s annual meeting at the U.S. Custom House in Lower Manhattan. She and other speakers displayed table after table showing that climate change, far from being a theory, is a reality.
She began by giving us the bad news. Among the signs that things are changing are heat waves, heavy rainfall, Nor’easters and hurricanes.