Weekend Reads 12/31/16

Ready for flooding: Boston analyzes how to tackle climate change

Damage from flooding, too, will increase as the climate warms. Around the middle of the century, the report projects that about seven percent of the city could be under water during one-in-10-year rainstorms unless the storm water system is improved. That includes portions of the subways and major highways, some of which are designated evacuation routes.

While rising sea levels do threaten to simply inundate some areas around the harbor, they also limit the effectiveness of drainage systems, which function based on the lower elevation of ocean water.

“A Christmas Carol” in Rural America

Like the school children of Christmases past in Belhaven, concerned citizens today have started a nonprofit, Pungo Medical Center, and secured funding to purchase the hospital building at its appraised value from the LLC that currently owns the building. With an injunction from Judge McGuire, these folks will have time to negotiate purchase in the new year and do the hard but essential work of re-opening their hospital to serve rich and poor alike.

France is now home to the world's first solar road

The new solar road, also dubbed Wattway, covers 1 kilometer (.6 miles) of roadway in the village of Tourouvre-au-Perche with 2,880 solar panels, with an estimated 2000 motorists using it each day, and the electricity generated by the system will go to power the street lighting in the small village, which has just 3,400 residents.

Naples’ sleeping volcano might be waking up

Even if the researchers are right, they would not be able to predict whether it would take Campi Flegrei a few years to erupt, a few decades, or more. Models can’t simulate the network of fractures and spaces that make up the volcano’s plumbing system.