I saw an interview with the connecticut governor and he said that his state has been hit hard by three separate disasters in the past year(knocking out power for over a million customers each tim). He explicitly spoke about global warming and that we need not only to invest innew infrastructure but we need to harden it to prevent it from being damaged. What should we do iif storms causing an enormous amount of damage become the norm rather than rare?

We might as well be worried about climate engineering as well. Who's to say that the remedy isn't worse than the problem?

I'm apprehensive about allowing our corporatist government the power to turn air into a trillion dollar+ commodity. Progress has shielded us from deaths related to extreme weather.

Until the right recognizes that global warming is something more than a liberal charade we won't get very far with any initiatives to stem the tide. Some talking heads say that even if the US gets with the international program on mitigating our carbon footprint today, it will still be too late.

To answer your question, my guess is that new paradigms in emergency response will need to be adopted nationwide/worldwide in order to deal with ongoing and regular calamities.

There's probably a silver lining in such a scenario though I can't seem to make it out. Less wars due to the need for military involvement in domestic peace keeping efforts? That's a stretch surely. A revamping of the insurance industry? A revamping of the electric grid systems and electric trade?