"We warned you and you (most of you) ignored the facts staring you in the face. Good luck with that."
-- Max Keiser
What
Sandy Is Teaching New York City That 9/11 Didn't
6
November, 2012
Eleven
years, one month, three weeks and five days ago I stood on West
Street in southern Manhattan and watched many hundreds of people
murdered, as a gray avalanche of concrete, glass and steel poured
forth from a disintegrating tower to the street below. The 9/11
attacks changed everything, for all time, and we all felt it
instantaneously.
Superstorm
Sandy delivers a message first heard on Sept. 11, 2001: New York, as
a proxy for the United States, is unprepared for anticipated 21st
century threats.
The
storm is different. Sandy elicits no moral shock of war, no blinding
national insult, "no unified, unifying, Pearl Harbor sort of
purple American fury," as a columnist put it
in Timemagazine after
9/11. Instead we're up against something much more elusive, an
enemy we're much more poorly equipped to deal with than sleeper
terrorist cells: the Earth.
"No
one seems to care about the upcoming attack on the World Trade Center
site," wrote Harvard psychology professor Daniel Gilbert in a
provocatively titled 2006 Los
Angeles Timesop-ed.
"Why? Because it won't involve villains with box cutters.
Instead, it will involve melting ice sheets that swell the oceans and
turn that particular block of lower Manhattan into an aquarium."
"Storms are more severe. Flooding is more severe. When you look at the design of the city, you really have to take these things into account," says GE's John McDonald
We
can describe the enemy's strategy. We know that the industrial
emissions of heat-trapping gases are warming the Earth's atmosphere
and changing climates. We know that heat melts ice, that heat makes
water expand and evaporate, and that tropical cyclones like warm
water and moist air. We know that we are facing the strange, strange
possibility that the intersection of rivers, the mountain valleys,
the islands off the coast of America, where humans have
built sophisticated settlements over the past 10,000 years,
might not be the best place for some of them toward the latter part
of this century.
We
know, from Munich Re's new study, Severe
Weather in North America,
that the number of natural catastrophes per year has been rising
everywhere since 1980, but nowhere as steeply as in North America.
"This increase is entirely attributable to weather events,"
the report states. More people have been moving into storm-prone
areas, and extreme weather is becoming more so. The world's largest
reinsurer calls for "an alliance between homeowners, businesses,
scientists and researchers, state/municipal and federal
governments and the insurance industry to prevent and mitigate the
results of extraordinary events."
Such
an alliance has its work cut out for it. It's one thing to erect a
new 100-story steel and glass obelisk to show terrorists we're not
afraid to live and work in the sky. It's quite another to build urban
systems adaptable to any of a number of projected futures. Restoring
New York and New Jersey is an exercise in climate change adaptation,
a largely theoretical policy topic until recently. Sandy puts
adaptation at the center of global attention, and demands an answer
to the tough question, what should governments, businesses and
citizens want to adapt to?
Cities
can adapt to the present, by updating infrastructure destroyed by the
storm. But what about 2050, when the city projects its mean
sea level [pdf]
could be a foot higher? What about 2100, when New York's average sea
level might be a meter higher than today? A paper published in Nature
Climate Change in
February models future storm surge flooding in New York City,
projecting about a one-meter sea level rise and more frequent surges.
The combination "may cause the present New
York City 100-year
surge flooding to occur every 3-20 years and 500-year flooding to
occur 25-240 years by the end of the century." Using more gut
than quantitative modeling, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said last
week, "We have 100-year floods every
two years now."
While
New York and New Jersey rebuild, what might regional alliances decide
in heat-scarred
Texas,
in baked Alaska,
in vanishing
Louisiana,
in the northbound
farm belt,
and many other places facing deep uncertainty about the future?
Post
Sandy, planners are in a tough spot, trying to bring the city back to
speed as soon as possible, and to avoid locking in decisions that
might have costly implications later.
"If
you have to rebuild, instead of rebuilding what was there, how can
you improve upon it?" asked John McDonald, director of technical
strategy and policy development for General Electric's digital energy
program. "The extremes we're experiencing are more extreme than
what we've experienced before," he noted in the same phone
interview, on Friday. "Storms are more severe. Flooding is more
severe. When you look at the design of the city, you really have to
take these things into account."
Officials
currently oversee infrastructure necessarily assembled as a patchwork
over time. Standards have improved and will continue to; McDonald
mentioned IEC
61850,
for example, which calls for better automation of power grid
substations. "Smart city" technology that works well in
small pilot project might not perform as well when deployed at New
York scale. The sooner we can learn lessons like that the better off
New York and many other places will be.
Political
and business leaders have analytical tools, such as cost-benefit
analysis, that help them make informed decisions. These methods --
cost-benefit analysis in particular -- are drawing increasing
attention because they insufficiently account for the scale and
variety of potential changes this century. So policy professionals
are developing new approaches to help leaders make decisions. The
World Bank in September published a paper, titled "Investment
Decision Making Under Deep Uncertainty: Application to Climate
Change"
(hat tip to David
Roberts at Grist.org).
It compares traditional cost-benefit analysis with other methods,
including an "alliance"-like approach called Climate
Informed Decision Analysis.
This
method encourages participants to build climate change projections
into a three-stage process. First, depending on the kind of
infrastructure they’re looking to build, participants map out their
priorities and tolerance for different kinds of risks. Those
priorities are then analyzed against relevant projections, to see how
sensitive they might be to climate change. Finally, they generate a
suite of “plausible futures” with help of computer modeling or
live experts. Such an approach was used successfully, according to
the World Bank authors, in a 2007 U.S.-Canadian agreement on Great
Lakes Basin stewardship, which was reached "on the premise that
we are limited in our ability to anticipate the future and therefore
any recommended plan must perform well on a very broad range of
possible futures."
The
paper argues for supplementing our practice of optimizing
decisions toward a single purpose within a single future, with one
that assumes business and government decisions will need to be
adaptable – but just how we can't say with certainty yet. "A
robust decision process implies the selection of a project or plan
which meets its intended goals – e.g., increase access to safe
water, reduce floods, upgrade slums, or many others – across a
variety of plausible futures," the authors write.
Successful
21st century cities need to build well-managed communities on top of
adaptable infrastructure. Since 2009, GE's McDonald has also
been chairman of the National Institute of Standards and Technology
body that is responsible for U.S. advanced power grid, or "smart
grid," standards. In March, the group signed a memorandum of
understanding with the Japan
Smart Community Alliance,
an organization representing more than 740 companies that are working
to rebuild cities destroyed by the March 2011 tsunami. "They're
further along in the concept of the smart community," McDonald
said.
Flood
protection, subways, tunnels, bridges, aqueducts, electricity grids,
food distribution, law enforcement, health and communications and the
other infrastructure and human systems now need to be built not only
to serve the needs of the present, but to anticipate and avoid the
least tolerable risks we can surmise about the future.
When
attacked by terrorists, you can determine who did it, and, with
great effort and expense in lives and money, kill their leader in the
night. Geophysical systems are different. The sea's attacks come
much,much slower. And the forces at its disposal are much more
powerful than any human actors. As Hunt Janin and Scott Mandia put it
in their new primer, Rising
Sea Levels: An Introduction to Cause and Impact:
"The technical concepts and terms can be stated very briefly
but the most important thing for us to recognize here is that, once
set in motion, sea level rise cannot possibly be stopped."
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