The Sloshy, Scary Future of New York City

Robert Lee Hotz has been writing about science for thirty years for various American newspapers, has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize twice and won it once, and these days works for the Wall Street Journal.

He writes big, thoughtful pieces about cutting-edge science. This is good, but it means he doesn't publish often, so when it does, it's an event. (At least for those of us who care about science reporting and climate change.) So it's worth ten or fifteen minutes of your life to read his latest on climate change and New York City, which comes with a remarkably extensive list of linked sources, graphics, and a video.  The story is called, bluntly, New York Braces for Risk of Higher Seas. Here's the lede:

When major ice sheets thaw, they release enough fresh water to
disrupt ocean currents world-wide and make the planet wobble with the
uneven weight of so much meltwater on the move. Studying these effects
more closely, scientists are discovering local variations in rising sea
levels — and some signs pointing to higher seas around metropolitan
New York.

Sea level may rise faster near New York than at most other densely
populated ports due to local effects of gravity, water density and
ocean currents, according to four new forecasts of melting ice sheets.
The forecasts are the work of international research teams that
included the University of Toronto, the National Center for Atmospheric
Research in Boulder, Colo., Florida State University and the University
of Bristol in the U.K., among others.

So the headlight and the lede are sharp, to the point, and new.

What follows — at least to this outsider — seems to have been hedged, perhaps in the editing. Might the paper have pressured Hotz to keep bringing up the resistance of landlords and city planners to mandating infrastructure change? Because if you read the numbers, it's pretty clear what the writer thinks.

To be fair, this debate — how much of a crisis does NYC face? — is taking place within the city itself. One can see that in this report published by a panel of experts assembled by Mayor Bloomberg, who published a report (New York City Report on Climate Change) that describes in alarming terms what will happen to the climate in New York in the next fifty years. Having done that, the experts then don't bother to say what the city should do about it. So Hotz has company. No one wants to freak out. 

Unfortunately, the facts seemingly do calling for freaking out. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but definitely before buying any property in the city. For instance, Hotz quotes a consulting engineer:

"If you have 20 inches of sea level rise, the edges of lower Manhattan
would flood 20 times a year," says Douglas Hill, a consulting engineer
at the School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences at Stony Brook
University. "It would look like Venice."

Later in the story, Hotz reveals that one of the studies above predicts exactly this scenario:

…melting Greenland glaciers could shift ocean currents enough to make
sea level along New York's 570 miles of shoreline an additional 20
inches higher than seas elsewhere. "It will cause the sea level along
the coastal region of the Northeast U.S. to rise faster," says climate
modeler Aixue Hu at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in
Boulder, Colo.

And, entirely separately, the aforementioned NYC panel on climate change estimates that under a slow-but-steady sea level rise scenario, as we have witnessed over the past century, the SLR by 2050 would be in the range of 7-12 inches. So NYC would look like a shallower Venice, but still — Venice.

New Yorkers are notoriously resistant to panic. Which is generally admirable. After all, the city has been around for hundreds of years…but this century, panic may actually be the rational response.

Below is a graphic from the NYC panel on climate change, charting the slow but steady sea level rise at the Battery. For a more dramatic rendering, take a look at this graphic/webcast from Pew Charitable Trusts, visualizing what NYC will look like when hit by a storm surge driven by a Category II hurricane. 

The webcast has everything you would expect from a full-on disaster movie except the toppling buildings, the people running panicked through the flooding streets, and the screaming…

SLR in the Battery, according to NYC Panel 

Conventional vs. Unconvential Thinking on Food

Mort Kondracke is at the heart of what we know of as "Washington."  He's a Fox commentator and a former cheerleader for the invasion of Iraq, who admired Bush's "anti-terrorism" policy.

Inside the Beltway thinking at its dullest and most conventional, in other words.

But on the subject of health care this week, Kondracke writes:

If a "war on diabetes" were declared, it ought to begin with a war
on obesity, the epidemic most responsible for rising incidence of Type
2 diabetes among both adults and, increasingly, children.

In 1980, the CDC estimated that 47 percent of U.S. adults were
overweight. In 2006, it was an astounding 66 percent, and 34 percent
were obese – 72 million people.

Insurance companies and employers have developed incentives for
workers to lose weight and become fit such as insurance premium
reductions or paid-for gym memberships, but fighting obesity ought to
be a major focus of health care reform.

It's interesting to see Kondracke endorse the Nixonian concept of a "war against diabetes" during the same health care week that famous food thinker Michael Pollan makes a similar point, but with much greater scope and specificity, in his column in The New York Times on agribusiness vs. health care. 

Pollan writes:

The American way of eating has become the elephant in the room in
the debate over health care. The president has made a few notable
allusions to it, and, by planting her vegetable garden on the South
Lawn, Michelle Obama has tried to focus our attention on it. Just last
month, Mr. Obama talked about putting a farmers’ market in front of the
White House, and building new distribution networks to connect local
farmers to public schools so that student lunches might offer more
fresh produce and fewer Tater Tots. He’s even floated the idea of
taxing soda.

But so far, food system reform has not figured in
the national conversation about health care reform. And so the
government is poised to go on encouraging America’s fast-food diet with
its farm policies even as it takes on added responsibilities for
covering the medical costs of that diet. To put it more bluntly, the
government is putting itself in the uncomfortable position of
subsidizing both the costs of treating Type 2 diabetes and the
consumption of high-fructose corn syrup.

Why the disconnect?
Probably because reforming the food system is politically even more
difficult than reforming the health care system. At least in the health
care battle, the administration can count some powerful corporate
interests on its side — like the large segment of the Fortune 500 that
has concluded the current system is unsustainable.

Agribusiness and its lobbyists may be friends of Kondracke's. In a column recommending plenty of government spending on health and diabetes, he never mentions food or agribusiness.

But Pollan sees a bigger picture. 

Recently a team of designers from M.I.T. and Columbia was asked by
the foundation of the insurer UnitedHealthcare to develop an innovative
systems approach to tackling childhood obesity in America. Their
conclusion surprised the designers as much as their sponsor: they
determined that promoting the concept of a “foodshed” — a diversified,
regional food economy — could be the key to improving the American diet.

All
of which suggests that passing a health care reform bill, no matter how
ambitious, is only the first step in solving our health care crisis. To
keep from bankrupting ourselves, we will then have to get to work on
improving our health — which means going to work on the American way of
eating.

Prediction: Once this concept dawns on the forces of Washington conventionality, we'll start seeing odes to soda, french fries, and McDonalds from their pals on the right…probably begining with Limbaugh.

We Did Not Come Here to Fear the Future

The conclusion of a great speech last night by some guy named Barack: 

I understand that the politically safe move would be to kick the can
further down the road — to defer reform one more year, or one more
election, or one more term.

But that is not what the moment calls for. That's not what we came
here to do. We did not come to fear the future. We came here to shape
it. I still believe we can act even when it's hard.
(Applause.) I still
believe — I still believe that we can act when it's hard. I still
believe we can replace acrimony with civility, and gridlock with
progress. I still believe we can do great things, and that here and now
we will meet history's test.

Because that's who we are. That is our calling. That is our character.

This question — will we face the facts, and rise to the occasion, or will fear and inertia determine our fate — is the central question we face today as a people. This is true not just on health care, but on the economy as well, and for that matter, on the fate of our planetary environment.

Frankly, the President has more faith in the American people than I do, but that's why I love him.

Grizzly Die-Off as Salmon Crash: Fish Farms Suspected

A sad story from the Globe and Mail in Canada. Grizzly bears in British Columbia are dead or dying, stream-walkers say, because nine million sockeye salmon expected to return from the ocean this summer have failed to appear.

The cause? The immediate cause for the salmon crash is believe to be sea lice, but experts suggest that the underlying cause is fish farms nearby, which create the conditions in which sea lice thrive. 

Alexandra Morton, who several years ago correctly predicted a collapse
of pink salmon runs in the Broughton Archipelago because of sea lice
infestations, in March warned the same thing could happen to Fraser
sockeye.

She said researchers used genetic analyses to show Fraser sockeye smolts were getting infested with sea lice in Georgia Strait.

“I looked at about 350 of this generation of Fraser sockeye when they
went to sea in 2007 and they had up to 28 sea lice [each]. The sea lice
were all young lice, which means they got them in the vicinity of where
we were sampling, which was near the fish farms in the Discovery
Islands. If they got sea lice from the farms, they were also exposed to
whatever other pathogens were happening on the fish farms (viruses and
bacteria), ” said Ms. Morton in an e-mail. 

That piscine disaster now has led to the vanishing of a charismatic megafauna:

Reports from conservationists, salmon-stream walkers and ecotourism
guides all along British Columbia's wild central coast indicate a
collapse of salmon runs has triggered widespread death from starvation
of black and grizzly bears. Those guides are on the front lines of what
they say is an unfolding ecological disaster that is so new that it has
not been documented by biologists.

Here's a map that shows the linkage between fish farms, sea lice, and salmon runs. You can tell what the newspaper is thinking….

Salmon_sea_lice__171741artw

Socialism: The Useful Menace and Sequoia Savior

To kill President Obama's health care reform plan, opponents have resorted to calling it "socialist." Some have even criticized his speech to schoolkids, urging them to stay in school and study, as "socialist."

To progressives, this line of attack might seem silly, or even absurd, but the truth is that this calumny has a long disreputable history. In the U.S. of A. Evidently it's more effective politically to attack opponents as socialist, regardless of the facts, than it is to thoughtfully consider the issues.

Once, ironically, this form of demonizing helped preserve the great California sequoias.

It's an interesting story.

In the 1880s, loggers were freely able to take enormous, ancient trees from the great groves in the Southern Sierra, despite the best efforts of the likes of conservationist John Muir, newspaper editor George Stewart, and scientist Gustav Eisen. The Western Mono Indians, to whom the sequoia was sacred, also begged lumberman to spare the colossal "wawona," warning that they would be cursed by bad luck, but the lumberman ignored them, using dynamite to blast the trees when they could not cut them down.

As Verna Johnston writes in her excellent book Sierra Nevada: A Naturalist's Companion:

It was probably the Kaweah Cooperative Colony, a group of about fifty-five socialists who set up a utopia near the Giant Forest in 1885-1886. that ignited the fuse of events leading to federal action on the southern big trees. The colonists, some half of them from San Francisco, planned an economy based on timber sales. After applying for quarter-sections of land in the area surrounding the Giant Forest, they built an eighteen-mile road into their timber stands. They renamed the largest local sequoia (General Sherman) the Karl Marx tree and other big trees for their various heroes. In the office of the Visalia Weekly Delta, thirty miles away, [newspapermen] George W. Stewart and Frank Walker shifted into high gear to get the trees into a national park. Said Stewart later: "We wrote letters to every person in the United States, in and out of Congress, whom we knew to be in favor of forest conservation and to every magazine and newspaper we knew to favor the idea. Their name was not legion in those days. The response, with few exceptions, was cordial."

The movement to save the big trees spread across the country. Washington was listening. In 1890, in two bills, Congress created the Sequoia National Park to perserve thirty-two groves of big trees and General Grant National Park to save the General Grant Grove…The Giant Forest became a part of the park, along with extensive high-Sierran wilderness. A year later hte Giant FGorest's socialist colony crumbled in dissension. 

So heaping calumny on the socialists was actually a good thing?

According to the well-known historian Carey McWilliams, the truth is that the socialists were a convenient scapegoat, when in fact conventional lumbermen with no ideals but plenty of saws, steam engines, and dynamite were the real tree killers. McWilliams writes in Factories in the Fields that the Kaweah socialists had no intention of destroying the forests or the sequoias, and he quotes a U.S. Commissioner who was sent out from Washington to investigate the claim in 1891:

"The purpose of these [Kaweah] colonists," he wrote, "is of a lawful and laudatory nature; and that instead of damaging the lands or destroying the giant trees thereon, they have expended about $100,000 in improving the lands and adding to their value, and have guarded and protected the giant trees for over five years, saving them from damage and forest fires on many occasions." 

Nonetheless the law was passed in Congress creating Sequoia National Park. The Kaweah settlers evicted, even from their holdings on private land, in one case by the U.S. Cavalry. But although they were unfairly targeted, the passage of the law ultimately did protect the giant trees from the more conventional and dangerous loggers.

It's an ill wind that blows no good, they say; well, here's some of the good left behind by this particular ill wind in American history…Crescent Meadow, in the Southern Sierra, via Jerry Ting.

CrescentMeadownearPorterville

Muir Lake: Another Perfect Day

Was I really here? A little over a week ago? Can't quite believe it…miss it already.

I know that posting vacation pics is a little cheesy in this oh-so-serious blog, but here's my justification:

One day's exposure to mountains is better than cartloads of books. See how willingly Nature poses herself upon photographers' plates. No earthy chemicals are so sensitive as the human soul. All that is required is exposure, and purity of material

[John Muir, from his notebooks collected in "John of the Mountains"]

IMG_3063

What You Ruin Ruins You

The post title is an ominous line from those of us aware that we are in a relationship with the natural world. (Sez me.) The line comes from a poem by Liz Waldener, soon to be seen in The New Yorker.

By the evidence of Semblance: Screens, her appearance is well deserved.

Here's the poem, via the great Poetry Daily.

A moth lies open and lies
like an old bleached beech leaf,
a lean-to between window frame and sill.
Its death protects a collection of tinier deaths
and other dirts beneath.
Although the white paint is water-stained,
on it death is dirt, and hapless.

The just-severed tiger lily
is drinking its glass of water, I hope.
This hope is sere.
This hope is severe.
What you ruin ruins you, too
and so you hope for favor.
I mean I do.

The underside of a ladybug
wanders the window. I wander
the continent, my undercarriage not as evident,
so go more perilously, it seems to me.
But I am only me; to you it seems clear
I mean to disappear, and am mean
and project on you some ancient fear.

If I were a bug, I hope I wouldn't be
this giant winged thing, spindly like a crane fly,
skinny-legged like me, kissing the cold ceiling,
fumbling for the face of the other, seeking.
It came in with me last night when I turned on the light.

I lay awake, afraid it would touch my face.

It wants out. I want out, too.

I thought you a way through.
Arms wide for wings,
your suffering mine, twinned.
Screen. Your unbelief drives me in,
doubt for dirt, white sheet for sill—
You don't stay other enough or still
enough to be likened to.

To tell the truth, first I thought this was the poem as warning. Exploring the power of the language with an ominous forecast of things to come. But now I think it's more than that. It's a desire for union with "the face of the other," that is, with the natural world, perhaps before it's gone…but at the same time, a fear of kissing spiders.

Fascinating work. Piranesi would understand…

Arch of Pola by Piranesi

A Pas de Deux for Grown-ups

For the last couple of years, I have been complaining about The Los Angeles Times website, which had so many problems it's not even worth the time to list them…well, amazingly, the new version they rolled out a week or so ago is absolutely first-rate. The search function even works. Unbelievable.

Here's a sample. Attached to a wonderful piece from last weekend about the marvelousness that is Mischa Baryshnikov at age sixty-one, is a brief video of a pas de deux he is doing on tour with an older dancer; that is, a woman about his age. (She's a Spanish dancer: her name is Ana Laguna.)

It's very simple, and yet touching beyond words can say…at least for yours truly:

 http://latimes.vid.trb.com/player/PaperVideoTest.swf

Needed: Anti-Hysteria Czar

So argues the great Washington Post reporter/columnist Joel Achenbach:

Is it my imagination or in recent years has hysteria become the
default response to anything even slightly controversial or offensive?

So the head of Whole Foods says in an Op-Ed that he doesn't like
the health care reform proposals. Liberals are aghast. The company must
be boycotted! We'll make Whole Foods sorry it ever tried to mess with
us!

It's not just liberals who are flipping out. The conservative-but-sane Rod Dreher has had it with right-wing fanatics as well, such as those who are calling Dallas schools and yelling at principals because, says Dreher, "the president of the United States is going to give an address on education to students."

Some commentators in Texas in fact are comparing Obama not only to Hitler…but to Charles Manson!

Writes Dreher:

A Texas Republican friend this morning told me two things: a) not all
conservatives agree with these people; and b) that said, this is the
last straw for him, that he doesn't want to be associated in any way
with the GOP, which in his view has lost its collective mind.

Unfortunately, the man best suited to the task of calming the nation just left us…

Walter-cronkite331249584506