Earth Changes

Don't knock the weather
If it didn't change
once in a while
nine out of ten people
couldn't start a conversation  
Kim Hubbard

The world is undergoing big changes.
As the gulf stream has moved farther northward, change , drastic change is inevitable as the climate changes.
With climate change comes coastline reconfiguration, changes in agriculture, business,nanufacturing, technology ,etc.
 Places that are now  inhabitable may become inhospitable and uninhabitable.
Nothing will remain the same.
Politics will also change as attitudes will begin to change.
 
We are beginning to see the effects of this change in the Gulf stream.
Whitley Streiber even wrote a book about a true to life scenario of change and it was made into a movie called 'The Day After Tomorrow'.

 Glen Gawarkiewicz, a senior scientist in WHOI’s physical oceanography department, and five of his colleagues recently published their findings that in October of 2011, the core of the Gulf Steam at the edge, or break, of the Continental Shelf had pushed 125 miles north of its usual position near Georges Bank. It was the farthest north at that longitude that the Gulf Stream had ever been observed.

 Today you can see power trucks from as far south as Alabama working on New Jersey's power lines to get things going again.
But here we are few days later waiting for yet another Nor'easter.
It is already very cold. You can see your breath when you are outside. Temperatures are ready to dip even lower, winds are picking up and there is a high wind and flood watch in effect for the coast tonight.

 With the protective sand dunes gone, this will mean even more damaging impact on the area.
 'Sandy' also cut new inlets between the ocean and the bay through the barrier island and pennisula, therefore the main coast is no longer as protected as it once was and NJ is vulnerable to even worse flooding now.

A heavy storm drags dunes and sand out to sea to create a barrier there.
This is how nature prevents huge sea waves from hitting the shore too directly.
It is a good thing and eventually the sand and dunes can come back.   But, it takes time to come back and repeated storms that happen after a big storm do not allow for that.
Also if the new inlets are not closed up, the  bay side will become more ocean than bay and the coast line will decrease.

Sandy was a record breaker .

LLM  at  Seaside Heights 

It had the lowest barometric pressure in history causing huge winds and extreme tides and waves.
Sandy saw New York Harbor with 20 foot waves, a new record.
The Jersey shore had 30 and more footers  breaking on the shore.
Had Sandy remained a hurricane on the same path as the super storm, the damage and flooding, including to New York City , would have been catastrophic.

Effect on People

Tough times can recreate a person's attitude and personality.
 There are all kinds of reactions to these things by various kinds of people.
Tough times expose the heart to the light and show us where we are right and where we are wrong and where we need to change and grow.
They also remind us  how tiny people really are in the scheme of things.