Sea levels are rising. Time to build …. floating cities?

WITH SEA LEVELS expected to rise at least 26 inches by the end of the century, due to human-driven climate change, to say that we have a problem is an understatement. By the middle of the next century, many of the world’s major cities will be flooded, and in some cases, entire island nations will be underwater. The people who live there will have to relocate. But to where?

With sea levels rising, is it time to contemplate floating cities?

On Wednesday, the United Nations Human Settlements Program, or UN Habitat, convened its first roundtable to discuss the possibility of floating cities as a solution to this problem. Held at its headquarters in New York City, on the banks of the East River, the location was fitting given that the room itself might be underwater within a century. The specific proposal that dozens of scientists, engineers, artists, and investors came to discuss was Oceanix City, which aspires to create a scalable platform for the seafaring civilizations of tomorrow.

Read the Wired story by Daniel Oberhaus - “Sea levels are rising. Time to build …. floating cities?”

Fossil record points to 'major transformation' of Australian ecosystems in next 100 years

If the world continues on a "business-as-usual" trajectory on climate change, global ecosystems including Australia's will undergo a "major transformation" over the next century.

Australia's ecology is
predicted to change
significantly if greenhouse
 gas emissions aren't reduced.

That's the warning from researchers who have analysed hundreds of pollen and fossil records from the Earth's last period of significant global warming, which followed the last glacial maximum around 14,000 years ago.

The study, published today in the journal Science, found that ecosystems that underwent low levels of change were "concentrated in regions where the temperature anomaly was relatively small”.

The researchers used their data to predict the amount of future ecological upheaval that would occur under warming scenarios of 1.5 degrees, 2.4 degrees, 3 to 4 degrees and 5 degrees, by the end of the century.

Read the story from ABC News by Nick Kilvert - “Fossil record points to 'major transformation' of Australian ecosystems in next 100 years.”

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?”