In his State of the City address, NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg introduced an interesting new concept related to disasters and emergencies. The city is soliciting civilian volunteers for this new venture, dubbed “Code Corps.” Volunteers will help build new databases, apps, emergency-related data dumps, etc.

According to the official NYC Digital website, Code Corps was created as a direct response to issues and needs that arose during Hurricane Sandy.  The effort is part of a larger push by NYC toward open data, utilizing existing data sets collected by the city and making them open to the public.

We posted this quote from Princeton University climate scientist Michael Oppenheimer on Tuesday:

“Shorter snow season, less snow overall, but the occasional knockout punch.  That's the new world we live in."

By the end of the week, 20% of the population of the United States was facing this massive winter storm. Way to prove a point, Mother Nature!

An AP article published this morning addresses the apparent winter weather contradictions of global warming:  due to atmospheric physics, we can expect less snow overall, but more severe snow when it happens.  It’s an easy read for a scientific article, but here’s the takeaway:

"Shorter snow season, less snow overall, but the occasional knockout punch," Princeton University climate scientist Michael Oppenheimer said. "That's the new world we live in."

Unlike their counterparts in the United States, Canadian officials are apparently drastically unprepared for the zombie apocalypse.  The issue was debated briefly on the floor of the House of Commons on Wednesday, according the Foreign Policy correspondent Daniel Drezner.

The National Hurricane Center released a detailed report on Hurricane Sandy earlier today.  The report included several interesting facts about the storm:

• 72 deaths were directly attributed to Sandy (with 87 more indirect deaths), the most since Hurricane Agnes in 1972
• The storm surged to 8.5 feet in NJ (Sandy Hook), 12.5 feet in NY (Long Island Sound) and 9.4 feet in NYC (the Battery)
• The storm destroyed 650,000 homes and killed power to 8.5 million people
• Second costliest hurricane in history, second only to Hurricane Katrina

Full report available here.