The recent spate of deadly twisters should give a 9/11-style weather wakeup call to Bay State developers, who – unlike their brethren in the Midwest and California – have long been shielded from Mother Nature’s escalating fury.

Yes, we all may like to pretend we are weather-hardened Yankees – a vanity TV weather folks stoke shamelessly – but let’s get real here: It’s been decades since we’ve had more to complain about than an occasional blizzard or some heavy rain. Scenes of wrecked towns and quake-ravaged towers were always a tragedy happening someplace else in a distant state or region.

But last week’s mayhem in Springfield, Monson and other points west drives home the point that when it comes to extreme weather, the Bay State is no longer immune.

Not only is it now clear that deadly weather can happen here, but in an age of climate change and shifting tectonic plates, Massachusetts and all of New England face even more serious long-term threats, from rising sea levels to the potential for a massive earthquake.

“It’s a crapshoot,” noted William Wheaton, a professor of economics at the MIT Center for Real Estate, of the difficulty in predicting just what kind of impact climate change will have – and won’t – on the Bay State and New England as a whole.

Floods & Earthquakes

To be fair, Wheaton said he sees more questions than answers right now on exactly how climate change will hit New England.

On one hand, he noted a University of Colorado study predicting a big shift upwards in mountain snow lines. That could have a big impact on the ski industry – and development plans in our north country – but at the same time, other predictions have the Northeast getting more wet, though not necessarily much colder.

And while the tragedy in Springfield has clearly stoked concerns that the extreme weather that has ravaged other states has arrived here, Wheaton cautions against reading too much into it.

He said he’s less concerned about what rising sea levels might do to a city like Boston – despite billions being sunk into harborside development – than to our nation’s still fast-developing southeast coast.

With a hardened waterfront some several feet above the waves, Boston probably has less reason to worry about being engulfed by a rise in ocean levels of a few feet over the next 50 years. By contrast, the coastal plain along Florida and other southern states offers a ready invitation to the sea, he said.

Still, others are less equivocal.

Vivien Li, president of The Boston Harbor Association, said rising sea levels may start to become an issue as soon as the next 10 to 15 years.

While far from predicting a Noah-style flood, she said she sees the harbor’s water level slowly rising and more frequently flooding seaside walks and waterfront plazas. Eventually, a larger system of waterfront walls and barriers will be needed – one in which all developers and property owners will likely have to participate.

“We are used to nor’easters, but they are more intense and more frequent,” Li noted. “We are clearly seeing a pattern of sea level rising. We are seeing many more places get wet that never got wet before.”

And this is just climate change we are talking about – we haven’t even gotten to the destruction that a major earthquake could wreak in Boston and across New England.

Earthquakes are relatively rare in New England compared to the West Coast, but the possibility still exists that a major temblor could hit the city someday, said John Ebel, director of Boston College’s Weston Observatory. New England saw a series of major quakes slam the region in the 17th and 18th centuries.

If a quake does hit, it would likely have a particularly devastating impact on the Back Bay and Fenway, which sit on less-firm landfill.

“My opinion is that we can’t rule out a major earthquake centered somewhere near Boston,” Ebel told me recently for a story I wrote for the Boston Courant.

Forever Changed

I say all this not to be a Chicken Little, but rather to challenge the complacency that natural disaster and climate change will somehow spare New England simply because it has in recent decades.

It wasn’t always the case. The great hurricane of 1938 flooded downtown Providence and swept hundreds of residents out to sea in towns and cities along the region’s coast. The Blizzard of ‘78 also shut down much of the state for a good week or two and caused the deaths of several unfortunate commuters.

Some will say that advances in weather tracking radar have increasingly made such nasty surprises a thing of the past. But just because we’ve had an easy few decades weather-wise doesn’t mean the old days of hyperventilating over snow storms and a hurricane every decade or two will last forever.

Fluke or not, our experiences with the tornadoes that turned parts of Western Massachusetts into a war zone will probably have all of us nervously glancing at the heavens the next time a big thunderstorm rumbles through. And whether those storms were connected to global climate change or not, it’s much harder now to see New England as the safe haven we’ve always assumed it was.

For Bay State developers poised to invest billions in new projects – some of which are likely in the path of rising sea levels or quake fault lines – it’s a wakeup call that could prove ruinous to arrogantly dismiss.