New York Can Be a Vibrant Venice as Sea Level Now Rises, Say Engineers

Nature’s Edge Notebook #37

Observation, Analysis, Reflection, New Questions

New York City could become a vibrant Venice even as sea level rise accelerates, say architects and engineers.

And it could do so, they add, without the problems of Venice, which is built on soft, subsiding soil. The towers of Manhattan stand directly on solid bedrock.

They’ve displayed their visions of a more water-friendly and thriving New York in the models and illustrations of an exhibit called “Rising Currents.”

It attracted city planners, engineers and architects not only from New York but coastal cities around the world. They started flooding into the exhibit when it first opened in 2010 at New York’s celebrated MoMA — the Museum of Modern Art.

You can take a brief tour of it in our two video segments below, guided by the creator and coordinator of the display.

Both Practical and Visionary

The expert visitors have been praising it as both practical and visionary.

It is practical, they say, because:

• Its 5 different suggestions for how to develop New York Harbor and the land around it are designed to meet worst case scenarios — including sea surges of 30 feet and more in a storm.

•   It is based on widely accepted climate science about sea level rise.

•   It is tempered by architects’ sensibilities about what may be economically feasible.

It is visionary because its illustrations, architects’ models and diagrams offer a realistic, comprehensive and integrated visual and conceptual picture of how harbor-hugging New York City could evolve over the coming decades of advancing sea level rise.

“New York City does not have to move,” Barry Bergdoll, the instigator and coordinator of this multi-group effort, told ABC News in the wake of Hurricane Sandy’s coastal devastation.

“We can turn disaster into opportunity,” he said.

Bergdoll, who is MoMA’s Chief Curator of Architecture and Design, said the “Rising Currents” project shows in comprehensive and thoroughly researched detail that “we can deal with high water if we have to.”

“Barriers alone can’t do it,” he told us, referring to the sea-surge floodgates being pondered for the three outer entrances to New York Harbor.

“We don’t have to be merely defensive,” he said. “We can turn it all to advantage, get co-benefits.”

The proposals, say many of the visiting experts, are inspiring also because they offer a universal vision of how it may be possible to maintain an energetic and enjoyable coastal city once planners accept the hard scientific reality of accelerating sea level rise that is at least partly due to man-made global warming — a reality uncontested among the world’s professional climate scientists.

As we detailed in our previous Nature’s Edge Notebook,  in about the year 1900, after thousands of years of little or no change, sea level started rising steadily. This was due to man made global warming, as climate scientists have repeatedly shown, which resulted in water expanding as it warmed and in new melting of land-based ice. In the 1990s the rate of sea level rise suddenly sped up — again for reasons that the climate scientists can link only to man-made global warming. It is now expected to increase another two or three feet by mid century, and as much as two meters by 2100.

The Inspiring Visions of ‘Rising Currents’

In the “Rising Currents” exhibit we see:

• Wall Street literally absorbing the occasional floods of storm surge by using new porous sidewalks, while office towers, built on rock, stand tall.

•   Beautiful new riverside parks in lower Manhattan.

•  Historic Lady Liberty and Ellis Island snug inside protective wave-attenuation barriers.

• New marinas and outdoor theaters on the bay — halfway toward a far more pleasant alternative to the dystopia seen in the movie “Waterworld.”

•  Even a newly rejuvenated and cleaned up natural harbor with healthy reefs for scuba sports divers, birdwatchers and other nature lovers.

“It’s doable,” said curator Bergdoll.

You can take a quick tour with Bergdoll in these two short video segments…

“New York City Could Be a Beautiful Venice”:

“Oyster-Tecture To Protect Lady Liberty”:

“Rising Currents” is also the sort of cumulative, learn-as-you-go project made possible in our newly warming world by the reviewable definiteness of the World Wide Web.

Its website  first went live in 2009 when Bergdoll’s visionary project was just getting launched, and proceeded to track its evolution and invite editorials.

As soon as Hurricane Sandy’s floodwaters began to drain from Manhattan (where Barry Bergdoll’s higher ground household was one of many that took in “downtown refugees” from lower ground), Bergdoll and his team at MoMA started work on updating the “Rising Currents” website, drafting additional reflections and invitations for further ideas and possible lessons learned — an ongoing project.

An Unusual — But Crucial — Expert

… in one of the last functioning “public squares.”

If Barry Bergdoll, a museum curator, seems like an unusual sort of expert to have assembled such a widely praised and visionary set of possible solutions to one of the most dangerous impacts of man made global warming — rapid sea level rise — he is.

But this appears, by all accounts, to be because his particular position and expertise have provided a much needed bridge in the global climate battle.

Man-made global warming has been widely described as an unprecedented crisis sorely in need of new communication among many professions and occupations that are usually separated. (This is sometimes shorthanded as “the stovepipe problem.”)

Global warming is an all-enveloping — indeed “global” –  problem.

“The art museum in contemporary society is one of the last few public squares,” Bergdoll remarked to this reporter in a post-Sandy phone call from the West Coast, where he was gazing out a hotel window across the Pacific.

New York’s MoMA provided a specific destination for officials from the world’s coastal cities as soon as “Rising Currents” opened for its seven-month run in 2010.

It created enough of a stir in that location to get embedded in the minds of many experts, who now continue to explore its ideas on the “Rising Waters” website, and increasingly on other sites that work the same problem of rising sea level now facing coastal cities.

“Fifteen of the world’s 20 largest cities are on the ocean,” said Bergdoll.

“Art fires the imagination,” he said.

“Images are much more memorable than facts,” he added.

Bergdoll’s insights seem to have included his recognition that, as a museum curator of architecture and design — comfortable with both complex mathematics and elegant illustration of physical human environments — he was perfectly positioned to help in this part of the global warming crisis.

His field and expertise could infuse the bloodless realities of hard numbers and complex engineering formulas with the flesh-and-blood emotions that art and illustrations can stimulate and that fuel the healthy and engaged life in which people naturally want to have realistic hope.

The hopes may inspired, for example, by the non-verbal illustrations of creative thinking from architects and urban planners who first look squarely at the reality of accelerating sea level rise and then start to have some fun as they look for beautiful solutions.

Psychological Benefit of Such Realistic Utopias — ‘Agency’

…and Public Opinion Insights from ABC’s Gary Langer

Two psychology notes about all this:

First, some utopian visions are notorious, of course, for producing horrors — for example, when they are built on fear, weakness and insult, as in the well-known example of Hitler’s Nazism.

But when grounded in cautious realism, a hallmark of the “Rising Currents” project, such visions of a bright future may offer something psychologists praise for its potential health and effectiveness — “psychological agency.”

It can give you a starting point, a handhold in the storm — something to help gain control and hope in a threatening situation.

Second, public opinion researchers discern psychologically-based patterns in the attitudes of various groups in different kinds of emergencies and crises.

Gary Langer, longtime director of public opinion research at ABC News, offers insights about how attitudes may shift and sources of natural leadership may vary in different kinds of social upheaval.

Insights into these two “psychologies” – exploring how public opinion and psychological agency may play out amid difficulties such as New York’s sea level challenge – are briefly presented in this video segment from Nature’s Edge:

“Two Psychologies of Global Warming: Experience and Agency”

Source : abcnews[dot]go[dot]com

Michigan and Bangalore: Global Warming Goes Global

(ASSOCIATED PRESS)

Missing Cherries, Cool Shirts in India, Syrian Civil War

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Nature’s Edge Notebook #33

Observation, Analysis, Reflection, New Questions

Western Michigan, sometime in August.

“The acorns are getting bigger,” said our good neighbor, Pat.

Just a quiet observation, her voice drifting through the big rangy bush between her back yard and the small back terrace of our little summer house.

I could hear the rhythmic whisk of her broom on the surface of her small  terrace in the dappled sunlight of a perfect early August summer morning.

“What does that mean?” I asked through the shrubbery… as I continued my summer’s task of moving a large jumbled pile of sawed-up tree limbs and trunks away from the back of our house so as to remove from temptation the termites who’d already built several large cities in some of the bigger chunks of our former cottonwood … a tree of notoriously weak standing that we’d had to have cut down because it was starting to lean out over the house, threatening to fall on it in a storm.

“It means autumn’s coming,” she answered as she continued her sweeping under the solid oaks towering above her house.

The chipmunk who lives under our summer house had also noticed the larger acorns — as shown by a few gnawed-out shells outside his bolt hole down beside the sill of our back screen door.

So, another natural cycle — larger acorns as summer lengthens.

It was an early hint of autumn that Pat, a year-round resident, had been noticing for years as she swept her back deck — and it came earlier each August than what most of us summer-only residents first remark, a sudden tiny splotch of yellow or light brown leaves amidst the walls of the otherwise deep green foliage of the trees crowding the dunes and creek-sides and country roads.

“First sign of autumn,” we’d say wistfully on spotting those few bright leaves, having to start thinking about our return to the cities.

Pat finished sweeping, and went back inside.

I kept lifting and moving heavy 18-inch-long tree sections (perfect size, once split, for the stove) to their new orderly stack at the back of our yard, delighting in the rough physical summer work, relocating my wood pile, while thinking also of what now seems clear: Not all the cycles we’ve been seeing in nature this summer are natural.

‘Too Much Time on My Hands This Summer’

“I’m going to have too much time on my hands this summer,” my old friend Bruce had told me back in June when I’d stopped by his office in town.

As kids in the 1950s, we and our sisters had played in the summertime woods and streams here.

His family’s orchard business in this west Michigan county was started by his grandparents and their siblings in the 1910s; now one of his sons, who poked his head in as we chatted, helps run it.

Bruce recounted how a string of 85-degree days in March this year brought out the blossoms of cherry and peach and apple trees — far too soon — followed in April by 19 nights of hard freeze that killed most all the crop.

“Last time we had something like that was 1945,” he said. That was a legendary year for his family and others here, when their usual hard-won bounty all but vanished.

Before midsummer it was clear that some 90 percent of Michigan’s fruit crop had been lost. Minnesota and several other upper Midwest and Northeast states have also suffered heavy loss of their fruit crop.

Those great cherries you’ve been eating each summer probably without knowing they came from Michigan, probably came, this year, from Washington state.

It’s not only the fruit farmers… and it’s not only in the United States.

By mid-August, headlines around the country were announcing that massive drought — firmly linked by virtually all the world’s climate scientists to manmade global warming — would be sending food prices up in America and other countries.

The world’s climate scientists have straightforward graphs showing how such heat waves and droughts have become more frequent worldwide, as they had predicted.

Everywhere, on front page, evening news, and website, we’ve seen pictures of American farmers standing in bare fields of cracked earth, pictures of immense advancing walls of dust storms revisiting the sites of the 1930s “Dust Bowl,” pictures of farm hands standing next to waist-high corn while reaching their hands high overhead to show where the corn should be by then.

There have been similar stories from India.

The backyards of Bangalore and of Kansas City have seemed at times interchangeable — thanks in part to the far more common access now to the WorldWideWeb,

That’s especially true in South India, where English is so often the lingua franca commonly used by its many different ethnic communities.

Just change the names of the farmers and a bit of their garb and they read like much the same story, with one or two different terms for the weather:

“Millions of Indian farmers stricken with weak monsoon rains, as drought looms in many states,” reads the subhead on an Associated Press story you may already have noticed on ABCNews.com.

Indian farmers seen standing in bare fields of cracked earth, but wearing those comfortable light cotton knee-length shirts that are as normal and sensible in the fields and paddies around Harayana and Srirangapatna as are blue jeans in the fields and orchards around Topeka and Hart.

And in American newspapers, the photos often look essentially the same:

(Getty Images)

Not Just in the US and India — It’s Global

The Centers of Continents Start to Dry Out

And it’s not just in the United States and India.

Each year now, such summertime stories tend to be increasingly frequent from all continents — from Europe and Asia, South America and both East and West Africa… from Italy, Brazil and China, and from Gambia on Africa’s Atlantic coast to Somalia on Africa’s Horn protruding into the Indian Ocean.

And in the southern hemisphere?

It’s winter there, of course, but the news is often about the same:

Just as a years-long drought in eastern Australia appears to be easing, parts of Western Australia report the driest year on record — hitting hard both east and south of the city of Perth, where dams are reported registering record low inflows, with inevitable stress on annual crops expected by agricultural boards.

Antarctica’s crops, of course, have not been vegetable.

They’ve been more giant icebergs breaking off as warming ocean currents continue to insinuate their way in under huge ice-shelves.

A truly global sort of news is emerging — as most of the world’s climate scientists predicted a quarter century ago.

Monitoring stations worldwide report a general pattern over recent years of the centers of continents beginning to dry out.

They also report that rains, when they do come (often on the down-wind edges of the prevailing winds, as in America’s Northeast) are hitting more often with far greater severity in the form of intense deluges that produce sudden destructive floods or quickly run off, often taking more topsoil with them, and don’t soak in.

Syrian Civil War and Global Warming — News Stories Emerge

Every day this summer, most anyone scanning the web or the national headlines has been able easily to find fresh “hard news” stories about the inexorable and rapid advance of manmade global warming.

Here are links to just a couple you may you may have missed:

•  ”Climate Change and the Syrian Uprising” reads the surprising headline at the Bulletin.org” —  though not surprising to those suffering in Syria.

That’s from the venerable Bulletin of The Atomic Scientists, founded in 1945 by widely respected scientists, including Albert Einstein and Robert Oppenheimer and some of those involved in the Manhattan Project at the University of Chicago.

This well-sourced and thoughtful article depicts how a recent “drought unparalleled in Syrian History lasted from 2006 to 2010 and led to an unprecedented mass migration of 1.5 million people from farms to urban centers,” which caught Syria’s Assad regime unaware and unprepared.

Not the sole cause of the Syrian uprising, of course — there is never a single cause — but the article details how that massive drought appears to have been a major necessary element setting it up.

Rising food prices, drought related, have also been cited by some analysts as contributing to discontent in Egypt and in the other upheavals in the “Arab Spring,” as well as in continuing political tensions in parts of Asia and Africa.

The intelligence agencies of many countries are now urgently warning their governments’ leaders about just this sort of climate-based destabilization.

‘You’re Gonna Need a Bigger Boat’  (And a Bigger Journalism)

Frequent reports now tell us the sea ice (frozen sea surface) of the Arctic Ocean is on track for its biggest late summer melt-back since records have been kept — and almost certainly since far longer than that.

• “We’re Gonna Need A Bigger Graph,” says author Daniel Bailey in his headline on skepticalscience.com.

He’s echoing the famous line in the movie “Jaws” uttered by Rory Scheider’s police chief Brody to Robert Shaw’s Quint on first seeing the size of the Great White’s jaws up close and then backing up, stunned, into the wheel house:

“You’re gonna need a bigger boat.”

In this SkepticalScience.com article, first spotted by this reporter on Joe Romm’s widely respected daily ThinkProgress/Climate Progress website, Bailey links to a telling graph showing “Sea Ice Extent: 1978-2012″ that is built on data from the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo.

It seems never to stop, now; the urgent global warming stories conveyed on mainstream media seem to come in daily.

They are hard to avoid. Even as I write this, just one of those coming in today tells of famously rainy Seattle approaching its longest dry spell on record. The record, in 1951, is 51 dry days in a row; they’re already at 41, with forecasters saying at least another 10 dry days is likely.

It’s not only bigger graphs that may be needed.

This reporter is hearing a growing member of professional American journalists saying that we also need a bigger journalism.

TO BE CONTINUED.  NEXT WEEK:  “Alert The Media!  There’s a New 4th Category of News”

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Source : abcnews[dot]go[dot]com