But those sorts of disasters are going to be increasingly common by 2050. "A 2.25-meter flood prior to the 1850s occurred once every 500 years," Horton told me. When Hurricane Sandy hit in 2012, it killed 52 New Yorkers, devastated the Sandy Point neighborhood of Queens, flooded the region's coastal areas, and brought widespread power outages-a once-in-a-lifetime weather event. What New Yorkers urgently need to understand, according to Horton, is that "rates of sea level rise in New York are greater than the global average." For one thing, New York happens to be sinking for mostly unrelated geological reasons for another, said Horton, "gravitational attraction between water and large ice sheets" means that "what's happening thousands of kilometers away, in Antarctica will have the greatest impact along the Atlantic seaboard." Over the next 33 years, New York will either be reshaped by flooding, or repeatedly brought to its knees by flooding. That means those scary photoshopped images of New York with flooded streets are real. "Different models show different trends," he said, pointing out that hurricane-force wind speeds and and increases thunderstorms are tough to estimate, but "we're locked in on sea level rise," he told me. Maybe more serious than the general problem of rising temperature is the increase in what would currently call "freak" events. According to Ben Horton, who researches sea level and environmental change at Rutgers University, New York might face more major storms, but it will almost certainly have to deal with floods. But even with all the resources of the five boroughs, that's a tall order. All of that is according to the estimates in the 2013 Climate Risk Information report from the New York City Panel on Climate Change (I'm using that report's low or median estimates). As one of America's wealthiest and most liberal big cities-where even some prominent Republicans are staunch climate hawks-it's not surprising that New York would commission a report like that, or take other steps toward fighting the effects of climate change.
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