Scientist Warns New York City Could Be Lost in 2084 Due to Climate Change
Opinion Advocates for ideas and draws conclusions based on the author/producer’s interpretation of facts and data.
By Michael Gold
It’s the year 2084.
New York City has been abandoned by the financial industry and most other corporations. New York’s airports have closed. Columbia University has relocated to Poughkeepsie. Most other surviving institutions have left the city, moving away from the coast.
The Statue of Liberty lies on its side in the water, swept off its base by massively high waves surging into Upper New York Bay, the result of a storm in 2042.
This nightmare scenario is a prediction of a possible future by a prominent geochemist, James Lawrence Powell, about what the world could be like if fossil fuel consumption isn’t drastically reduced.
Powell served on the National Science Board under Republican Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush and earned a Ph.D. in geochemistry from MIT. He was the president of several colleges and museums throughout his career, including Franklin & Marshall College and The Franklin Institute science museum in Philadelphia.
I read Powell’s book recently, titled “The 2084 Report – A Novel of the Great Warming.” It’s a shocking fiction, but a necessary one.
In Powell’s scenario, the 2042 storm, aided by increased sea levels due to climate change, floods the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel and rushes into the financial district.
“The storm not only left large swaths of Manhattan underwater, it swamped the Rockaways, Coney Island, and other sections of Brooklyn,” Powell writes. “Parts of Long Island City, Astoria, and Flushing Meadows Park were underwater in Queens, as well as a section of Staten Island…the entire transportation system failed. Power went out immediately throughout the city…Many companies and organizations saw no future on the island…”
Other cities are brought low by climate-related catastrophes as well. New Orleans and Miami drown. Phoenix becomes too hot to live. California is scorched by endless wildfires.
Internationally, Switzerland is becoming as warm as Morocco. Skiing is now impossible.
Millions of people become climate refugees, including Americans in the South and West. The U.S. declares war on Canada to provide moderate living temperatures for its suffering, starving citizens.
Powell urges the world’s leading industrial nations to build nuclear power plants as the way to solve our climate dilemma, instead of continuing to construct coal plants (India and China are notorious leaders in this area) and drilling for oil, such as the U.S, Russia and Saudi Arabia.
Westchester and Putnam counties have been in the shadow of the Indian Point nuclear plant for decades. Many residents are now relieved it’s been shut down.
While we need to ask whether we can safely produce nuclear power, all of us can take far more advantage of solar and wind, simply by buying it from utilities. Alternatively, you can put solar arrays on your roof and in your backyard, use air-source or geothermal heat pumps and purchase or lease an electric vehicle, or at the very least, a plug-in hybrid.
I have read in the pages of this newspaper a few letters to the editor questioning whether climate change is really happening. We have all experienced the flooding of local roads from storms. I’ve often driven through water up to the middle of my wheels. We had to raise the level of the Saw Mill River Parkway because of the problem. Many homeowners in Mount Pleasant have seen their basements flooded.
A wildfire this past November, traditionally a cold, rainy month, burned more than 5,000 acres in Sterling Forest, a little less than 50 miles from Westchester. Putnam County had tornadoes in 2018. The summers feel uncomfortably hotter, and the winters are far too warm.
Another line of attack I’ve read is that climate change has often occurred in the ancient past. That’s true; the Earth has experienced exceptionally warm periods and ice ages.
But here’s the problem. Humans didn’t exist when dinosaurs were stomping around the planet. There was no such thing as an economy.
During the last Ice Age, which ended about 10,000 years ago, the human population may have been two to eight million people, according to the Journal of Archeological Science, Volume 58, in June 2015. Our ancestors were nomads who walked everywhere, hunted animals and picked berries. They lived in huts and caves. Do we want to go back to that? I think we would miss Netflix, chocolate and 800 other things.
Maybe a T-Rex would thrive in our new summer heat, but a lot of people won’t. Our older citizens, in particular, are vulnerable to higher temperatures.
We all need to take climate change more seriously. I will not be around in 2084, but the idea of losing New York City is painful.
The only upside to the abandonment of New York City would be that Westchester and Putnam home values would soar through the roof. That’s an outcome I’d rather not see if it meant that the city goes to ruin.
Michael Gold has had articles published in the New York Daily News, the Albany Times Union and other newspapers, and The Hardy Society Journal, a British literary publication.
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