--- Dwayne Monroe <idoru345 at yahoo.com> wrote:
"In other words, these things are actually so evocative, and so imaginatively stimulating, that it's hard not to get at least a tiny thrill at the idea that you might get to see these things happen."
Way back in the sixties, Paul Goodman said the same thing about the threat of nuclear annihilation: for the very alienated, confused, hyper-stressed elements of the population, the idea of an engulfing apocalypse actually had a kind of allure -- a relief from anxiety.
Today, they're right out front about it!
BobW
> Seeing the Ballardian aspect of climate change
> warnings, Geoff Manaugh of BLDGBLOG writes:
>
>
>
>
> In a subscriber-only article over at New Scientist,
> NASA climate scientist James Hansen describes what
> the
> planet might look like after a "runaway collapse" of
> the West Antarctic ice sheet.
>
> The collapse, or melting, of the sheet, of course,
> would be caused by increased global temperatures –
> temperatures altered by the atmospherically unique
> quantity of carbon dioxide that's now floating
> around
> up there. That carbon dioxide has been released by
> human industrial processes.
>
>
> "There is not a sufficiently widespread appreciation
> of the implications of putting back into the air a
> large fraction of the carbon stored in the ground
> over
> epochs of geologic time," Hansen writes.
>
>
> In any case, the article points out that this future
> sea-level rise will actually increase over time, as
> the melting of the ice sheet itself accelerates.
>
>
> As an example, let us say that ice sheet melting
> adds
> 1 centimetre to sea level for the decade 2005 to
> 2015,
> and that this doubles each decade until the West
> Antarctic ice sheet is largely depleted. This would
> yield a rise in sea level of more than 5 metres by
> 2095.
>
> That would be more than enough to flood London, as
> discussed in the previous post – not to mention
> Shanghai, New York, Mumbai, and so on.
>
>
> >From the article:
>
> Without mega-engineering projects to protect them, a
> 5-metre rise would inundate large parts of many
> cities
> – including New York, London, Sydney, Vancouver,
> Mumbai and Tokyo – and leave surrounding areas
> vulnerable to storm surges. In Florida, Louisiana,
> the
> Netherlands, Bangladesh and elsewhere, whole regions
> and cities may vanish. China's economic powerhouse,
> Shanghai, has an average elevation of just 4 metres.
>
> This is obviously meant as a warning.
>
>
> However, the main problem I have with using maps and
> scenarios like this to get people worked up about
> climate change is that these warnings often seem to
> have the opposite effect.
>
> In other words, these things are actually so
> evocative, and so imaginatively stimulating, that
> it's
> hard not to get at least a tiny thrill at the idea
> that you might get to see these things happen.
> Nothing against Miami, but all of south Florida
> under
> several meters of water? With Cape Canaveral lost
> under a subtropical lagoon and St. Petersburg an
> archipelago?
>
> The problem, it seems, is that climate change
> scientists, in describing these unearthly
> terrestrial
> reorganizations, are science fictionalizing, so to
> speak, our everyday existence. The implicit, if
> inadvertant, message here seems to be: hey, south
> Floridians, and all you who are bored of the world
> today, sick of all the parking lots and the 7-11s,
> tired of watching Cops, tired of applying to
> colleges
> you don't really want to go to, tired of credit card
> debt and bad marriages, don't worry.
>
> This will all be underwater soon.
>
>
> It could be called liberation hydrology.
>
>
> Climate change becomes an adventure – the
> becoming-science-fiction of everyday life.
>
> [...]
>
>
>
<http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2007/07/liberation-hydrology-miami-2107-ad.html>
>
>
>
> .d.
>
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>
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>