The view above is of the near term–so long, SoDo!–but it gets very exciting around around 2100, when Lake Washington joins once again with Puget Sound. That requires a rise of about nine feet. Hard to credit? Their summary notes that: “Global warming has raised sea level about eight inches since 1880, and the rate of rise is accelerating.” Continue reading Hey, Seattle! Time to Play “Who Drowns First?”
“Where is the last place that I would want to be, during a big Seattle Fault earthquake or a subduction zone quake if there was a reasonable-sized tsunami in Puget Sound?” Montgomery added, finishing his thought. “The last place I’d want to be is in a big hole under the waterfront.”
However compelling he is in laying all this out, short-term catastrophes are not what Montgomery spends most of his time thinking about. His last book, Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations, is required reading for anyone who’s read Jared Diamond’s Collapse. Continue reading The Dirt on Seattle’s Tunnel-Vision Future
Ironically, though he commands an audience other scientists only dream of–you’ve likely seen Peter Ward on PBS, or might even have seen him unsettling the audience at TED–the exposure has mainly given Ward insight into the Cassandra effect. If your view of a calamity is sufficiently horrific, it gets described as a “dystopian vision,” which makes it sound like a literary threat. A year after publication of The Flooded Earth, he sees a “complete lack of action, a complete lack of conversation” on the realities of climate change. Continue reading Will We Drown in Climate Change Denial?
