Sometimes you don’t recognize the significance of a date until years later. I’ve been thinking about Friday, December 11, 1992. There was a full moon. Strange things happen when the moon is full, some based in superstition, some based in fact. This story is based in fact. Full moons pull the tide higher, which was unfortunate on December 11, ’92, because a late-autumn Nor’easter was blowing along the Atlantic coast.
There were a number of storm surges and breached dunes and flooded seaside towns, but one effect of the storm sticks in my mind: the New York City subway shut down. If you’re not familiar with New York, that may not seem like a big deal, but believe me, it is. It takes quite a punch to shut down public transit in one of the world’s great commuter cities, and it happened that day. Tunnels were flooded, electric transformers were inundated with water and knocked offline. It wasn’t just the subway but also the trains of Metro North, New Jersey Transit, the Long Island Railroad and Port Authority Trans-Hudson. Millions of commuters were stuck in the wrong state or borough well into the weekend, sleeping in the office, eating Chinese take-out.
Meteorologists said the December ’92 storm was a rare event, the kind of thing that happens every 40 or 50 years, but I expect I’ll see it happen again, three or four times, maybe. Computer models of global warming predict both more frequent and severe storms and rising sea levels, two pieces of bad news if you rely on the F line trains to get you to Manhattan in the morning and back to Brooklyn at night.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group of 3,000 scientists, announced recently that global warming is occurring faster than we thought – perhaps twice as fast – and we may see a global temperature increase of five degrees by the end of this century.
This week, representatives of 170 nations are meeting in Bonn, Germany, trying to get the stalled Kyoto Protocol talks back on track. The problem is George Bush. In February, just days after taking office, Mr. Bush declared the greenhouse-gas cutting goals of Kyoto were contrary to American economic interests. He complained the protocol compels industrialized nations to take larger steps to reduce greenhouse pollution than developing nations. The United States, with five percent of the world’s population, produces over 20 percent of its greenhouse gas.
Predictably, another greenhouse offender, Japan, has since announced that if the U.S. will not be bound by Kyoto, neither will Japan. Japan’s economy has been in a years-long funk and Japan’s leaders perhaps believe they can drive their economic engine clean, as the oil company commercial suggests.
Back home, Dick Cheney is out promoting the administration’s energy package, only this time, his speech has a few lip-service lines about conservation. Mr. Cheney could not mouth these words himself, he begged off, citing laryngitis, and had his wife announce tepid support for conservation. Meanwhile, in DC, the Cheneys want the U.S. Navy to pay the electric bill on the 33-room vice president’s mansion, estimated to amount to $186,000 this year. Not that the Cheneys would have paid the bill personally in any case, but they say it’s too hard for the vice president’s office to budget, what with utility bills being what they are.
On Friday, Mr. Bush will be in the seaside city of Genoa, Italy for the Group of Eight meeting. There will be no moon out that night, so he need not fear tides and storm surges. Ostensibly an economic meeting, the G-8 agenda will be dominated by talk of global warming. Leaders like Tony Blair, Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schroeder recognize global warming is an economic issue, and unless the United States acts – decisively and soon – it will be high tide for us all.
High Tide for Us All
Sometimes you don’t recognize the significance of a date until years later. I’ve been thinking about Friday, December 11, 1992. There was a full moon. Strange things happen when the moon is full, some based in superstition, some based in fact. This story is based in fact. Full moons pull the tide higher, which was unfortunate on December 11, ’92, because a late-autumn Nor’easter was blowing along the Atlantic coast.
There were a number of storm surges and breached dunes and flooded seaside towns, but one effect of the storm sticks in my mind: the New York City subway shut down. If you’re not familiar with New York, that may not seem like a big deal, but believe me, it is. It takes quite a punch to shut down public transit in one of the world’s great commuter cities, and it happened that day. Tunnels were flooded, electric transformers were inundated with water and knocked offline. It wasn’t just the subway but also the trains of Metro North, New Jersey Transit, the Long Island Railroad and Port Authority Trans-Hudson. Millions of commuters were stuck in the wrong state or borough well into the weekend, sleeping in the office, eating Chinese take-out.
Meteorologists said the December ’92 storm was a rare event, the kind of thing that happens every 40 or 50 years, but I expect I’ll see it happen again, three or four times, maybe. Computer models of global warming predict both more frequent and severe storms and rising sea levels, two pieces of bad news if you rely on the F line trains to get you to Manhattan in the morning and back to Brooklyn at night.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group of 3,000 scientists, announced recently that global warming is occurring faster than we thought – perhaps twice as fast – and we may see a global temperature increase of five degrees by the end of this century.
This week, representatives of 170 nations are meeting in Bonn, Germany, trying to get the stalled Kyoto Protocol talks back on track. The problem is George Bush. In February, just days after taking office, Mr. Bush declared the greenhouse-gas cutting goals of Kyoto were contrary to American economic interests. He complained the protocol compels industrialized nations to take larger steps to reduce greenhouse pollution than developing nations. The United States, with five percent of the world’s population, produces over 20 percent of its greenhouse gas.
Predictably, another greenhouse offender, Japan, has since announced that if the U.S. will not be bound by Kyoto, neither will Japan. Japan’s economy has been in a years-long funk and Japan’s leaders perhaps believe they can drive their economic engine clean, as the oil company commercial suggests.
Back home, Dick Cheney is out promoting the administration’s energy package, only this time, his speech has a few lip-service lines about conservation. Mr. Cheney could not mouth these words himself, he begged off, citing laryngitis, and had his wife announce tepid support for conservation. Meanwhile, in DC, the Cheneys want the U.S. Navy to pay the electric bill on the 33-room vice president’s mansion, estimated to amount to $186,000 this year. Not that the Cheneys would have paid the bill personally in any case, but they say it’s too hard for the vice president’s office to budget, what with utility bills being what they are.
On Friday, Mr. Bush will be in the seaside city of Genoa, Italy for the Group of Eight meeting. There will be no moon out that night, so he need not fear tides and storm surges. Ostensibly an economic meeting, the G-8 agenda will be dominated by talk of global warming. Leaders like Tony Blair, Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schroeder recognize global warming is an economic issue, and unless the United States acts – decisively and soon – it will be high tide for us all.