Global Warming and Cities

The second installment of Elizabeth Kolbert's series on climate change is available on the New Yorker website. I'm very curious about Elizabeth Kolbert now, since her articles are excellently written, and in particular, manage to bring together completely disparate scientific debates about ecological change and social collapse, climate modelling, and paleoclimatology. There is also an interview with her on the New Yorker website here. Plus, I like the fact that the title of her most recent book, The Prophet of Love ironically refers to Rudy Giuliani. A Gotham Gazette interview about her last book appears here.

I'm happy to make global warming the first concern among other environmental concerns in cities, if only because of its likely catastrophic effects. National Geographic has a nice feature section that details the the current effects of global warming on the earth, as well as many emerging and previously unexpected consequences. The Pew Center on Global Climate Change, an excellent source of comprehensive global warming information, also prepared a specific report last year on the observed effects of climate change in the U.S..

Disruption of the earth's weather, climate, ecosystems, and food will certainly affect all aspects of human society, but particularly immediate and onerous consequences for cities include:

1. Rising sea levels: The melting of the Greenland ice sheet would drastically raise sea levels, swamping the coastal cities that house a majority of the world's population. Look at this terrifying (and great) animation of the effects of rising sea level on Florida and other regions of the United States and world, courtesy of the University of Arizona Geosciences laboratory. Even the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency sketches out some fairly dire impacts on coastal zones. A conference on the impacts of global climate change on transportation and infrastructure also features a number of papers on regional impacts here, including first the flooding of, and then the subsequent alteration of transportation patterns.

2. Extreme weather events: Weather, as the short-term state of the atmosphere, is not the same as climate, the long-term patterns of weather and precipitation in the atmosphere. This distinction is lost in particular in awful articles like this one from the Fox network from last fall, that points to the relatively cool summer of 2004 as proof against the existence of global warming. A fairer and more balanced assessment of the effects of climate change on hurricane frequency -- such as the likelihood of the four hurricanes that struck Florida last year -- can be found here. Computer models of local climate have predicted increased temperatures and precipitation, though as far as I know, not frequency. Another good review article on this particular subject is Goldenberg et al., "The Recent Increase in Atlantic Hurricane Activity: Causes and Implications", Science 2001 293: 474-479.

Though a major hurricane hasn't yet struck Miami -- at least for the near future in which it is not underwater -- people in both finance and science have started to calculate and visualize what the prospective impacts might be. Another good source to consider the likely direct financial impacts of global climate change on cities is the insurance industry. As noted in a discussion group here:

Anyone interested in the truth on the issue of climate change might be interested in looking at the reports from the reinsurance company Swiss Re. For years, this 140 year old Swiss insurance company has had scientists studying climate change and other human-caused risks to our environment.... go to their website and do a search for "climate change". There are 90 reports listed. Everything is from the financial risk point of view of a conservative insurance company.

3. Disease: As ecosystems are disrupted by climate change, this will also shift disease vectors and ranges, as described in articles by Paul Epstein, a Harvard Medical School researcher, in this article in the Encyclopedia of Energy and in this article in Scientific American. Disease has always been a fundamental concern in cities, which I will be writing about next week.

Finally, I feel compelled to mention sources to help combat skepticism about global warming in the media, which is heavily distorted by industry funding. The May/June issue of Mother Jones featured an article on the funding of global climate change skepticism by Exxon Mobil here, including the author of the article from FoxNews above, Stephen Milloy ($90,000). Another good sources is Ross Gelbspan's The Heat is Online, an extension of his book The Heat is On, about industry-funded disinformation in the media.

[Update 5/20/05: A new article here on storms and climate change on Realclimate.org, and a new post on this website to links predicting impacts of climate change on cities.]