This purports to show the effect of sea level rise on new York City after two°C of temperature increase. This is of course relevant today since Trump pulled the US out of the Paris Climate Accord/Agreement/Anything-But-A-Treaty, which would have accomplished nothing because its strictures on the US were minimal and nonexistent on the likes of China and India, both of which are far greater “carbon footprint” threats going forward than the US. Additionally, since Trump made his announcement a number of US cities and states have come together to say they are going to reduce CO2 by the US’s agreed-upon amount anyway… which shows that it’s not the FedGuvs job in the first place.
Anyway, the video. It’s technically really good; the water in the streets looks real. I’ve seen some people claim that the water levels are inconsistent from street to street, but I don’t know NYC, so I can’t comment on that. I’ve also seen people comment that this is some terrifying vision of the future, but I honestly don’t see it. For starters, the ocean level rise shown here is what you might expect after a century or more. And if NYC does anything, it’s knock down old stuff and build new stuff. Sea level rise like this in a century? Not a problem. Secondly: I’m forever hearing New Yorkers whine about traffic. Well… here ya go! The city streets are now cleared off not only of cars, but of junkies and bums. Plus, look at the buildings, water or no: most of them look like, well, “tenements.” Horrifyingly soul-crushing people-warehouses. The city just looks *ugly.* From the looks of it, most of NYC getting washed away could only improve the joint.
AND ANOTHER THING:
The radio and TV talking heads keep yapping about how the US is abandoning “leadership” of fixing climate change to the likes of China. Ummmm…. how, exactly? Before this, American tech firms, science labs and universities would invent some spiffy new PV cell or improvement thereupon, the Chinese would promptly Culturally Appropriate it and mass produce the hell out of them via slave labor and crappy environmental regulations, flooding the market with PV arrays so cheap that it doesn’t make sense to manufacture them in the US. After Trump’n’Paris… how’s this going to be different? What *exactly* was the US FedGuv going to do otherwise that would have been so important that American companies, if it made any economic sense at all, weren’t going to do anyway? Before this, was the US government going to crank out terawatt-class thorium reactors by the cargo ship load, but now they’re not?