Monthly Archives: December 2007

The most disturbing place I visited this last year was New Orleans. To those visiting for the first time, even in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans is exotic. The French Quarter has a beauty that is unique, right now, this area of New Orleans has revived, with all businesses reopened and the tourist traffic quietly growing. It is more than two years since Katrina, and while half of the city’s evacuees (about 200,000) will never return, there is still a steady trickle that are returning, with the intent to rebuild.

C’est magnifique, mais c’est folie.

Nearly 80 percent of New Orleans lies below sea level. At the time I set out for the Big Easy, National Geographic published a story suggesting that if the sea level rose by 3 feet, then Lake Pontchartrain would no longer be a lake but a bay, and New Orleans would be pretty much gone. As it passed through, Hurricane Katrina destroyed a big piece of the wetlands that serve to protect New Orleans from hurricanes. But the wetlands have been losing 24 square miles each year since the 1930s. Katrina wasn’t even that big a hurricane. It was force 3 when it came ashore, but it came ashore East of New Orleans. It was only force 2 in the Big Easy itself, but that drove enough water ashore and into Lake Pontchartrain to break the levees.

In any event, a 3ft rise in sea level is pretty much a given in the coming years. For that increase, scientists no longer calculate “if” they try to guess “when” – and it is no simple task. Most of the ice that is on land is in Greenland or Antiarctica. If all of the glaciers elsewhere melted, then the sea level would rise a mere 1.5 ft. Luckily, most of the ice on Greenland and Antarctica cannot melt. It is lodged in areas where the temperature never rises as high as zero. Calculating how much of the ice in the coastal areas of Greenland and Antarctica will melt and when it will melt is the difficult thing. As far as I can tell, all we can do at the moment is measure what’s happening and model it, until we get close to being able to predict it accurately.

So, What About My Home Town?

If you happen to live on the coast and you want to know if your property or your home town is destined for a watery grave, there are some useful resources on the web. Earthtools links to Google, to provide a contour map capability that can tell you precisely the height above sea level for most of North America and Europe. A more disturbing capability is provided by architecture2030.org. This provides pictures of how various coastal cities in the US will look after various increases in sea level rise.

If, for example, you’d like to see New Orleans after a 1 meter rise in sea level then click here. It’s sobering – especially when you realise that there’s neither the political will, nor the money to save New Orleans. And the same may be true for many other cities that are far too coastal for their own good (like New York, London, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Amsterdam, etc.) It is simply a fact that the vast majority of the commercial centers of the world are on the coast, or near to the coast, and most of them are vulnerable to quite modest rises in sea level. Right now, nobody is working to preserve any of these great cities.

For that to happen, the world needs a poster child – a great city that does disappear irretrievably. My guess is that it will be New Orleans. It is a beautiful place, and the time to visit it is now, while it still exists.

When you leave it, say “adieu” not “au revoir”.