기후 변화와 해수면 상승, 만약 뉴욕이 베니스처럼 물에 잠긴다면?
[...] lower Manhattan is indeed much lower than upper Manhattan, like by about fifty vertical feet on average. And that has made all the difference. The floods inundated New York harbor and every other coastal city around the world, mainly in two big surges that shoved the ocean up fifty feet, and in the flooding lower Manhattan went under, and upper Manhattan did not. (p.34)
And so New York keeps on happening. The skyscrapers, the people, the what-have-yours. The new Jerusalem, in both its English and Jewish manifestations, the two ethnic dreams weirdly collapsing together and in the vibration of their interference pattern creating the city on the hill, the cirt on the island, the new Rome, the capital of the twentieth century, the capital of the world, the capital of capital, the unchallenged center of the planet, the diamond iceberg between rivers, the busiest, noisiest, fastest-growing, most advanced, most cosmopolitan, coolest, most desirable, mosr photogenic of cities, the sun ar the center of the wealth in the universe, the center of the universe, the spot where the Big Bang occurred. (p.35)
The truth is that the First Pulse was a profound shock, as how could it not be, raising sea level by 10 feet in 10 years. That was already enough to disrupt coastlines everywhere, also to grossly inconvenience all the major shipping ports around the world [...] Sure, people stopped burning carbon much faster than they thought they could before the First Pulse. Too late, of course. The global warming initiated before the first pulse was baked in by then and could not be stopped by anything the post-pulse people could do. (p.139)
Assisted migration, human-assisted movement of species in response to climate change, is a general term that encompasses a variety of different potential actions, which have substantial differences in terms of risk, ecological implications, and policy considerations.
“Why didn’t they take over the uptown towers?” Stefan asked the old man.
“They tried and it didn’t work.”
“So what?” Roberto said. “That was only one night! What if they kept trying every day?”
“It doesn’t occur to them.”
“Why not?”
“They call it hegemony.”
(p. 546)
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2017년 4월 27일자 뉴요커지 아티클 / 에디터 조슈아 로스만(Joshua Rothman)