Disappointed By The Rapture? Try Worrying About The Real World.

by Stuart Shapiro

Feeling low because this isn’t really the “End of Days?” We may not have had devastating earthquakes this weekend, but climate change still has plenty of natural disasters in store for us in the years ahead.

Heavy rains, deep snowfalls, monster floods and killing droughts are signs of a “new normal” of extreme U.S. weather events fueled by climate change, scientists and government planners said on Wednesday. . . An upsurge in heavy rainstorms in the United States has coincided with prolonged drought, sometimes in the same location, she said, noting that west Texas has seen a record-length dry period over the last five years, even as there have been two 100-year rain events.

Maybe the folks predicting the end of the world were wrong but to paraphrase REM, but climate change is likely to mean the end of the world as we know it over the next several decades.

By: Stuart Shapiro

Stuart is a professor and the Director of the Public Policy
program at the Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers
University. He teaches economics and cost-benefit analysis and studies
regulation in the United States at both the federal and state levels.
Prior to coming to Rutgers, Stuart worked for five years at the Office
of Management and Budget in Washington under Presidents Clinton and
George W. Bush.