Sublime

of succeeding, according to a recent study based on current emissions trends, are one in 20. If by some miracle we are able to limit warming to two degrees, we will only have to negotiate the extinction of the world’s tropical reefs, sea-level rise of several meters and the abandonment of the Persian Gulf. The climate scientist James Hansen has cal

Since the close of the crevasse period, land loss to the south has brought the city some twenty miles closer to the Gulf. It’s been estimated that for every three miles a storm has to travel over land, its surge is reduced by a foot. If this is the case, then the threat to New Orleans has grown seven feet higher. “Drive out nature though you will w

were a storm as powerful as the Labor Day hurricane of 1935 to strike Key West today, they say, the 22,000-person island would likely be wiped as clean of life and property as the Matecumbes were years ago. Were such a storm to strike a major population center such as Miami, property damage would likely outstrip Andrew one hundred times over.)

for instance, if the ice-like crystalline structures containing large amounts of methane on the ocean floor become unstable and erupt. In a relatively short time, disasters could strike around the world, overwhelming our attempts to

Hansen is better known, however, for his 1988 congressional testimony as well as a related 1988 paper74 that he published in the Journal of Geophysical Research. This set of predictions did rely on a three-dimensional physical model of the atmosphere. Hansen told Congress that Washington could expect to experience more frequent “hot summers.” In hi

“All of this will make you less able to handle unlikely but ultimately inevitable catastrophes. Especially if they compound. A war on top of an unstable climate on top of a pandemic, for example.”

of succeeding, according to a recent study based on current emissions trends, are one in 20. If by some miracle we are able to limit warming to two degrees, we will only have to negotiate the extinction of the world’s tropical reefs, sea-level rise of several meters and the abandonment of the Persian Gulf. The climate scientist James Hansen has cal

On top of nuclear war, in the coming decades humankind will face a new existential threat that hardly registered on political radars in 1964: ecological collapse. Humans are destabilizing the global biosphere on multiple fronts. We are taking more and more resources out of the environment while pumping back into it enormous quantities of waste and