Today is Blog Action Day. Here's the basic idea:

On October 15th, bloggers around the web will unite to put a single important issue on everyone’s mind - the environment. Every blogger will post about the environment in their own way and relating to their own topic. Our aim is to get everyone talking towards a better future.

Arguably the top environmental issue is global warming, thanks in part to newly minted Nobel laureate Al Gore. So what would global warming look like here in the five boroughs?

Senator Liz Krueger, further down this page, notes our "regional population and business density, as well as our geographic vulnerability to the impacts of global warming".

CNN, in a posting dated April 7, 1998, forecasts three scenarios for New York.

Global warming and resulting rising sea levels have the potential to put much of New York City and other low-lying areas at risk of severe flooding, according to a study conducted by Columbia University researchers.

Subways, airports and low-lying coastal areas could experience flooding if global warming produces more violent storms and higher sea levels, as expected, said Vivien Gornitz, associate research scientist at Columbia's Center for Climate Systems Research.

Local temperatures could rise by as much as four degrees Fahrenheit, and sea levels could increase by up to eight inches by 2030 and by as much as four feet by 2100 under the most extreme scenarios, she said.

Gornitz's study is part of a series of studies being funded by the federal government to assess regional vulnerability to climate change. The results, with reports from 18 other regions, will be presented to Congress and the president by 2000.

Gornitz presented three potential scenarios for the period 1995 to 2030: a low-change scenario based on current trends without any greenhouse-induced warming; a middle ground, based on simulations from the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory at Princeton University; and a high-change scenario developed at the Goddard Institute, called Business as Usual, that assumes greenhouse warming takes place without any mitigating efforts.

Although none of the models find significant increase in precipitation, temperatures are expected to increase by one to four degrees, according to all three models.

Also, all the scenarios show local sea-level increases, ranging from four to eight inches by 2030, and maximum coastal flood heights of nearly six feet, an increase of nearly a foot from current levels.

That means that any area below six feet above sea level would be vulnerable to flooding, including most of the lower Manhattan shoreline, coastal and island areas of Jamaica Bay, much of downtown Hoboken and Jersey City and south shore beaches in Staten Island and the Rockaways.

A more recent article from 2006, also quoting Vivien Gornitz and sourced to NASA research, confirms the dangers facing a global metropolis on the shores of the Atlantic:

"With sea level at these higher levels, flooding by major storms would inundate many low-lying neighborhoods and shut down the entire metropolitan transportation system with much greater frequency," said Vivien Gornitz, a climate scientist who is part of a team at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) and Columbia University.

Gornitz, along with Cynthia Rosenzweig, another researcher on the team, say that higher sea levels put New York City at greater risk of hurricane storm surge. They estimate that in the case of a 1.5-foot-rise in sea level, "surge for a category 3 hurricane on a worst-case track would cause extensive flooding in many parts of the city. Areas potentially under water include the Rockaways, Coney Island, much of southern Brooklyn and Queens, portions of Long Island City, Astoria, Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, Queens, lower Manhattan, and eastern Staten Island from Great Kills Harbor north to the Verrazano Bridge."

The policy discussion is finally beginning to move from the question of whether global warming is real to the questions of what to do about it. One thing is clear: even an incremental rise in sea levels poses dangers to a City built mainly on islands, without clear means of evacuation for those parts of it unconnected to the mainland. We can't stop global warming at a municipal level, though we can and need to reduce our carbon footprint; but we would be well served if the administration began planning for mitigating measures based on the assumption that sea levels and temperatures will in fact rise.

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