Weather the storm

For a long time, climate change loomed as a series of dire hypotheticals. Now, it’s a reality, and one that will take on a bigger significance in our lives in the years to come. In a recent projection, the New York City Panel on Climate Change estimates that the city will experience 10% annual increases in precipitation and temperatures between 2 and almost 5 degrees warmer by the 2030s, just around the corner. Sea levels could rise a foot.

Many of the issues we write about have at least some visible path to a solution, even if it is difficult and ultimately incomplete. If Rikers Island has a consistent culture of mismanagement, negligence and violence, then a federal receiver can cut through some of the ingrained culture and quickly implement staffing and policy changes to help turn things around.

If streets are getting more deadly, we can advocate for more targeted vehicular enforcement and greater penalties for dangerous driving. If the city is struggling with the costs of accommodating asylum seekers, we can call on the federal government to provide logistical assistance and cash. And so on.

Climate change turns this approach on its head. It’s not that we can’t do anything about it — there is much we can and in fact must do to mitigate its impact — but it requires all-but-politically-impossible global coordination and a commitment to completely overhauling some of our social and economic practices. Even then, what we’ll achieve isn’t a full-fledged fix but simply an opportunity to avoid the most extreme damage of a process that we long ago already set in motion.

Over decades, some politicians and entrepreneurs have been promising that some silver-bullet technology is just around the corner, be it mass carbon capture, fusion power or something else.

We should start getting used to the idea that we’ll instead have to contend with the now unavoidable impacts of our climate impact. That means advance planning to deal with extreme heat, storm surges and sea level increases in a way that doesn’t treat these circumstances as sudden and unexpected emergencies but part of routine life in New York City.

These preparations fall to both our leadership and us as individual New Yorkers. The former must rethink their approach to emergency management to be less focused on shocks and more focused on communicating regularly with the public about evolving threats and having the tools and resources to protect life and health at the drop of a hat if, say, a heat wave suddenly soars city temperatures into hazardous ranges for weeks at a time.

As New Yorkers, we also have to start reckoning with the specter of climate catastrophe. While we may pride ourselves on resilience and toughness, we have to take warnings seriously and have family plans in place to deal with these situations as they emerge. We have to start teaching our kids about the dangers at an early age. It will definitely help for students to begin learning about the perils of climate change in class, as they are beginning to in city public schools.

Above all, New Yorkers have to look out for each other. A changing climate will affect everyone, every neighborhood, every class. The only way forward is together.