He told attendees of Advisen's Property Insights Conference last year. In all honesty, there was likely an even mix of audience members laughing at him as there were with him.

This year, Advisen was kind enough to invite Coch back.

He didn't gloat. He didn't need to.

Everyone this year now knows Coch has been right all along—that he is indeed no Chicken Little—thanks to Superstorm Sandy, which in October 2012 fulfilled Coch's prophecy that New York would someday be home to the world's longest aquarium—its subway system.

The affirmation of Coch's theories based on decades of study doesn't mean the “Master of Disaster” has packed it in. Oh no—quite the opposite. The professor doesn't stop to gloat because there is no time to.

Sandy was “not the big one,” he said from a stool in front of his famous slideshow presentation complete with homemade graphics and manipulated photographs.

“The big one is yet to come—and we're overdue,” he continued.

And the storm category has no bearing. If Sandy—not even classified a hurricane—made landfall 100 miles north of where it did, “New York City could have been wiped out,” said the lifelong New Yorker.

Coch said storm surge was just one of the destructive aspects of Sandy. The professor says meteorologists would better serve residents by predicting the height of wind-driven waves on top of surge.

Some residents in the path of Sandy might have thought they were safe after listening to storm surge predictions. “That's why they died on Staten Island,” he softened and said.

Debris and the force of wind in between the city's tall buildings were major destructive factors during Sandy, and will be amplified when a stronger storm strikes. Wind pressure is intensified when it's squeezed.

But what might be most striking were Coch's thoughts about inland flooding. The phrase wasn't uttered post-Sandy but Coch says it played a major role in flooding from the “freak” storm.

Manhattan was built upon a series of rivers shown in early maps, he showed. The water is still there somewhere, he said, and topography of the upper East Coast increases the chances of fresh-water flooding from rivers and off mountains.

Water comes in from the ocean, and down off the mountains.

“You can't understand Sandy without fresh water flooding,” Coch said.

But what really makes New York so dangerous is the right angles formed by Long Island. The water will need a place to go, and it can only move west, into the city, with its low-lying infrastructure, utilities, hospitals and airports.

Coch says rebuilding at higher elevation is an exercise in futility unless we build way up—WAY up. Home rebuild on 8-foot stilts may last a generation but their time will also come, considering the erratic changes in weather and rising sea levels. (the only way you can deny climate change is if you can't read a thermometer, he added).

“We shouldn't elevate; we should abandon,” he said. “The shoreline is retreating. We should too.”