Climate Change

In this era of global warming, how is it that the northeastern U.S. just experienced four nor'easters in the space of three weeks, and Spain, Italy, Ireland, and England were slammed by Arctic winds, bitter cold, and major snowstorms?

Most scientific research on the influence of climate change on hurricane activity has focused on the relationship between warm Atlantic Ocean conditions and tropical activity in the basin, but how is climate change going to affect the risk of U.S. hurricane landfalls?

Understanding how climate change affects the severity of extreme weather phenomena is something we care deeply about at AIR, as it is part of our mission to help companies make more informed decisions and, ultimately, to help make society more resilient in the face of natural disasters.

No pun intended, but there's no question that climate is a hot topic these days. Every week, you likely come across articles describing new research into the earth's warming, or how certain cyclical effects are having an impact on the weather.

After years of negotiation, two historic climate change agreements aimed at mitigating the effects of global warming have finally come to fruition.

The globe that you may have at home presents the world as a perfectly smooth, spherical planet, which of course it isn't.

“Men argue,” wrote Voltaire, “nature acts.” Today people are certainly arguing about the scope, impacts, causes, and even (albeit increasingly rarely) the very existence of climate change.

Boston is basically a hill in a harbor surrounded by low-lying land reclaimed from salt marsh (fens) in the 1800s. In addition to hurricane and earthquake risk, it is increasingly threatened by flood.

Worldwide, only four heat waves have been blamed for more deaths than the one currently being experienced in India, which is now associated with the loss of about 2,500 lives and is the second deadliest in the nation’s history.

Rising sea levels, climate change, and resiliency are buzzwords floating around lately, and we engineers and catastrophe modelers are paying attention.