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I'll never forget Hurricane Katrina - the mix of a natural and a man-made catastrophe that resulted in the death of over 1,500 of our neighbors. Millions of folks were marked by the tragedy.

I've been fascinated with severe weather since I was four, when I saw a tornado at night in my mom and grandmother's southeast Minnesota hometown while everyone else was asleep - an experience I encoded in 'The Stormchasers.'

The reality of Katrina didn't really strike me until the first time I flew up in a helicopter and saw areas of the city that I had ridden my bicycle as a youth being fully flooded.

When I left school, I never wondered whether my apartment in New York was vulnerable to storm surges, but my three daughters have to consider the realities of extreme weather and how it may destabilize communities around the globe.

As you know, Hurricane Sandy has affected thousands of families, leaving them without electricity, without household goods and, in the worst cases, without a home.

People are seeing the impact of climate change around them in extraordinary patterns of floods and droughts, wildfires, heatwaves and powerful storms.

Every day, it seems, a new extreme weather catastrophe happens somewhere in America, and the media's all over it, profiling the ordinary folks wiped out by forest fires, droughts, floods, massive sinkholes, tornadoes.

I've been through natural disasters. I lived down in Miami and was down there for Hurricane Andrew which was a Category 5. There were members of my family that thought they were going to die. Everyone was in the bathtub.

Prosperous communities are much better able to survive hurricanes or other natural disasters because they have greater resources, both public and private, to fall back upon.