Is this hurricane about to hit New York?

In May of 2005, a few months before Hurricane Katrina, I wrote an article that nobody noticed. It was entitled “Thinking Big About Hurricanes: It’s Time to Get Serious About Saving New Orleans.” Afterwards, the article was passed around furiously and I was hailed for having some sort of deep insight. I didn’t: The danger was staggeringly obvious and I was only channeling what many experts at the time knew.

With all eyes now focused on Hurricane Irene, which threatens a series of U.S. east coast landfalls, it is time to think seriously once again about worst case scenarios—and also, about how global warming could amplify them. And no, I am not saying that Irene threatens to bring about a worst case, that global warming caused Irene, or taking any other silly reductionist position. Rather, I’m saying that Irene focuses our attention on our serious vulnerability, and we need to seize that moment--because too often our default position is to act like nothing bad is going to happen. There are several places in the United States, besides New Orleans, where a strong hurricane landfall could be absolutely devastating. So I am not forecasting anything about Irene--I'm just saying it's time to look at worst cases in general.

What's the worst case for New York City, as the world warms and sea levels rise? Here's what I wrote in my 2007 book Storm World :

Even as we act immediately to curtail short term vulnerability, every exposed coastal city needs a risk assessment that takes global warming scenarios into account....Scientists at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York have been studying that city's vulnerability to hurricane impacts in a changing world, and calculated that with 1.5 feet of sea level rise, a worst-case-scenario Category 3 hurricane could submerge "the Rockaways, Coney Island, much of southern Brooklyn and Queens, portions of Long Island City, Astoria, Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, Queens, lower Manhattan, and eastern Staten Island from Great Kills Harbor north to the Verrazano Bridge.” (Pause and think about that for a second.)

We live in a presentist country that rarely pays attention to long term risks or worst case scenarios, until it is too late. When it comes to hurricane disasters in particular, rising sea levels make the risk steadily worse over time, whether or not hurricanes themselves get much stronger.

So what are our major coastal cities doing to protect themselves? That’s the question we should all be asking right now.