Page - 177 - in Water, Energy, and Environment - A Primer

temperatures and sea levels would bring even worse than the damage from Hurricane Sandy.’ He also stated that ‘By mid-century, up to a quarter of all NewYork City’s land area, where 800,000 residents live today, will be in the flood plain, and 40miles of our waterfront could see flooding on a regular basis just during normal high tides. We no longer have the luxury of ideological debate. The bottom line is we can’t run the risk.’ To me an even more disturbing article, by Justin Gillis published in theNewYork Times on12August 2013, discussed in some detail the potential future implications of possible sea level rise. He quotes thework ofDr JohnMercerwho ‘pointed out the unusual topography of the ice sheet sitting over the western part of Antarctica’ and speculated that ‘climatic warming could cause the whole thing to degrade rapidly on a geologic timescale, leading to a possible rise in sea level of 16 feet.’He also refers to a paper (71) co-authored byDrMichael O’Leary of Curtin University in Australia, who together with five colleagues ‘spentmore than a decade exploring the remote Figure 10.3 Global surface temperature. (Source: U.S. National AeronauticsandSpaceAdministration) Policy considerations 177