I decided to spare you my views on the frankenstorm and its possible connection to climate change. That is a very tempting topic that is very dear to me but is not directly related to our syllabus this semester. But the following article that appeared in today's NYT must be read. It is a rather brief account of the sad state of affairs that we have come to accept. I post this article because it does reflect 100% my thinking on this matter. I do believe, sadly, that we have come to accept climate change as a development that we can adapt to. The we , however, does not represent much more than 10% of humanity. Read the following and write a frank comment. Please do not try to be politically correct.
Deciding Where Future Disasters Will Strike
By McKENZIE FUNK
WE all have an intuitive sense of how water works: block it, and it
flows elsewhere. When a storm surge hits a flood barrier, for instance,
the water does not simply dissipate. It does the hydrological equivalent
of a bounce, and it lands somewhere else.
The Dutch, after years of beating back the oceans, have a way of
deciding what is worth saving with a dike or sea wall, and what is not.
They simply run the numbers, and if something is worth less in terms of
pure euros and cents, it is more acceptable to let it be flooded. This
seems entirely reasonable. But as New York begins considering coastal
defenses, it should also consider the uncomfortable truth that Wall
Street is worth vastly more, in dollar terms, than certain low-lying
neighborhoods of Brooklyn, Staten Island and Queens — and that to save
Manhattan, planners may decide to flood some other part of the city.
I think I was the only journalist who witnessed the March 2009 unveiling
of some of the first proposed sea-wall designs. “Against the Deluge:
Storm Surge Barriers to Protect New York City” was a conference held at
N.Y.U.’s Polytechnic Institute in Brooklyn, and it had the sad air of
what was then an entirely lost cause. There was a single paying
exhibitor — “Please visit our exhibitor,” implored the organizers —
whose invention, FloodBreak, was an
ingenious, self-deploying floodgate big enough to protect a garage but
not at all big enough to protect Manhattan. When we lined up for the
included dinner, which consisted of cold spaghetti, the man waved fliers
at the passing engineers. But as I look back over my notes, I can see
how prescient the conference was. A phrase I frequently scrawled is
“Breezy Point.”
One speaker got a sustained ovation. He was an engineer from the Dutch
company Arcadis, whose $6.5 billion design is one with which I suspect
we will all soon be familiar. It is a modular wall spanning 6,000 feet
across the weakest point in New York’s natural defenses, the Narrows,
which separates Staten Island and Brooklyn. Its main feature is a giant
swinging gate modeled on the one that protects Rotterdam, Europe’s most
important port. Consisting of two steel arms, each more than twice as
long as the Statue of Liberty is tall, Rotterdam’s gate is among the
largest moving structures on earth. And New York’s barrier would stretch
across an even larger reach of water — “an extra landmark” for the
city, he said triumphantly. That’s when everyone began clapping.
The engineers in the room did not shy away from the hard truth that
areas outside a Narrows barrier could see an estimated two feet of extra
flooding. If a wave rebounding off the new landmark hits a wave
barreling toward it, it could make for a bigger wave of the sort that
neighborhoods like Arrochar and Midland Beach on Staten Island and Bath
Beach and Gravesend in Brooklyn may want to start fretting about.
I attended the conference not just because I was interested in the fate
of New York, my onetime home, but because I was recently back from parts
of Bangladesh decimated by a cyclone. By now it is commonplace to point
out that climate change is unfair, that it tends to leave the big
“emitter countries” in good shape — think Russia or Canada or, until
recently, America — while preying on the low-emitting, the poor, the
weak, the African, the tropical. But more grossly unfair is the notion
that, in lieu of serious carbon cuts, we will all simply adapt to
climate change. Manhattan can and increasingly will. Rotterdam can and
has. Dhaka or Chittagong or Breezy Point patently cannot. If a system of
sea walls is built around New York, its estimated $10 billion price tag
would be five times what rich countries have given in aid to help
poorer countries prepare for a warmer world.
Whether climate change caused Sandy’s destruction is a question for
scientists — and in many ways it’s a stupid question, akin to asking
whether gravity is the reason an old house collapsed when it did. The
global temperature can rise another 10 degrees, and the answer will
always be: sorta. By deciding to adapt to climate change — a decision
that has already been partly made, because significant warming is
already baked into the system — we have decided to embrace a world of
walls.
Some people, inevitably richer people, will be on the right side of
these walls. Other people will not be — and that we might find it
increasingly convenient to lose all sight of them is the change I fear
the most. This is not an argument against saving New York from the next
hurricane. It is, however, an argument for a response to this one that
is much broader than the Narrows.
