FUTURE HUMAN
The Maps You Can’t Unsee
How climate scientist Ben Strauss is making climate change local
As Hurricane Sandy moved into New York City in 2012, I walked out to the Hudson River and watched the water churn. It was more gray-green than usual, and frothy, and high. Really high. On the Jersey City side, it seemed to be just a foot or two below the retaining walls running along the riverside walk. Later in the day, the Hudson would break above those walls and flood into the streets. Like downtown Manhattan, much of downtown Jersey City was inundated. Parts of Hoboken, just up the river, would stay submerged for days.
Over the next days and weeks, climate change became local for many of us. Global mean projections rattled off in media reports turned into block-by-block discussions of who got flooded and where you could get heat and power. Opinions changed and hardened, and took politicians along with them.
It is that power of the local that Ben Strauss wants to capture. He is CEO of the non-profit organization Climate Central, which has produced a remarkable collection of flood maps that have captivated me ever since I came across them shortly after Sandy. They let you dial in some amount of sea level or global temperature rise, and then view the effect on most any city in the world.
