The Maps You Can’t Unsee

As Hurricane Sandy moved into New York City in 2012, I walked out to the Hudson River and watched the water churn. It was more gray-green than usual, and frothy, and high. Really high. On the Jersey City side, it seemed to be just a foot or two below the retaining walls running along the riverside walk. 

Hurricane Sandy, 2012.

Later in the day, the Hudson would break above those walls and flood into the streets. Like downtown Manhattan, much of downtown Jersey City was inundated. Parts of Hoboken, just up the river, would stay submerged for days.

Over the next days and weeks, climate change became local for many of us. Global mean projections rattled off in media reports turned into block-by-block discussions of who got flooded and where you could get heat and power. Opinions changed and hardened, and took politicians along with them.

Read the Medium story by Michael Segal - “The Maps You Can’t Unsee."

Can New York City be saved in the era of global wamring?

Hurricane Sandy flooded huge
 parts of Lower
Manhattan and downtown Brooklyn.

It's a bright spring day in New York, with sunlight dancing on the East River and robins singing Broadway tunes. I'm walking along the sea wall on the Lower East Side of Manhattan with Daniel Zarrilli, 41, the head of New York's Office of Resilience and Recovery – basically Mayor Bill de Blasio's point man for preparing the city for the coming decades of storms and sea-level rise. Zarrilli is dressed in his usual City Hall attire: white shirt and tie, polished black shoes. He has short-cropped gray hair, dark eyes and an edgy I've-got-a-job-to-do manner. Zarrilli may be the only person in the world who holds in his head the full catastrophe of what rising seas and increasingly violent storms mean to the greatest city in America. Not surprisingly, instead of musing about the beautiful weather, he points to the East River, where the water is innocently bouncing off the sea wall about six feet below us. "During Sandy," he says, darkly, "the storm surge was about nine feet above high tide. You and I would be standing in about four feet of water right now."

As Zarrilli knows better than anyone, Hurricane Sandy, which hit New York in October 2012, flooding more than 88,000 buildings in the city and killing 44 people, was a transformative event. It did not just reveal how vulnerable New York is to a powerful storm, but it also gave a preview of what the city faces over the next century, when sea levels are projected to rise five, six, seven feet or more, causing Sandy-like flooding (or much worse) to occur with increasing frequency. "The problem for New York is, climate science is getting better and better, and storm intensity and sea-level-rise projections are getting more and more alarming," says Chris Ward, the former executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the agency in charge of airports, tunnels and other transportation infrastructure. "It fundamentally calls into question New York's existence. The water is coming, and the long-term implications are gigantic."

Read Jeff Goodell’s Rolling Stone story - “Can New York Be Saved in the Era of Global Warming?”

Wildlife refuge now claimed to be 'climate-resistant'

T

he Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge is a favourite spot for the birdwatchers and nature-lovers of New York City, as well as for tourists visiting the city.

A slice of wild wetland not far from JFK Airport in Queens, the reserve hosts both freshwater and saltwater habitats, attracting a wide diversity of birds. There are over 320 different bird species that have been spotted at the site, and prior to 2012, the park received about half a million visitors per year.

But when Hurricane Sandy hit in October of 2012, this special place sustained some damage.

West Pond, a 45-acre body of brackish water, was breached and is now exposed to a higher flow of salt water. The surrounding water’s edge has changed with the new salinity, and invasive species are choking native trees.

Today, three organizations announced the start of a major restoration project, which not only aims to preserve the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge as a key habitat for migratory birds, but will work to make it more resistant to higher sea levels and a changing climate

Read the Treehugger story - “Climate-resistant restoration announced at NYC ecological treasure”.

Rose reduced to tears over Scanton's 'drive into the future'

Roy Scranton.

Roy Scranton’s piece “Learning how to die in the anthropocene” left Anna Rose in tears.

Scranton served in the U.S. military from 2002 to 2006 and tells of his experiences in arriving in Baghdad and likened it to “driving into the future”.

And the future he said arrived, for Americans, not because of war, but because of climate change being expressed when Hurricane Katrina demolished New Orleans and Hurricane Sandy left New Yorkers gasping.

Scranton discusses the extreme prognosis delivered by the World Bank and the equally hard to comprehend findings of many of the world’s leading climatologists, that when considered objectively, threaten humanity’s survival.