Coastal Living

Looking at the cover of the July New Scientist, I wondered what other combinations might have worked for the coverline. How about Adieu Acadiana? Bye-bye Bangladesh? Cheerio Calcutta? Netherlands: Nice Knowin' Ya? Ah, the possibilities are endless. In fact, two-thirds of the world's large cities and some 634 million people are vulnerable to rising sea levels and increasingly violent storms. No laughing matter that. No indeed.

The cover story is an essay by James Hansen, the eminent NASA scientist who has made it his mission to alert the world to the perils of global warming. Here he warns that scientific projections of sea level rise are being sandbagged and that, under business-as-usual scenarios, we stand to experience a multi-meter increase in sea level this century! If that's the case, then why aren't more scientists sounding the alarm. Hansen posits:

I believe there is pressure on scientists to be conservative. Caveats are essential to science. They are born in scepticism, and scepticism is at the heart of the scientific method and discovery. However, in a case such as ice sheet instability and sea level rise, excessive caution also holds dangers. "Scientific reticence" can hinder communication with the public about the dangers of global warming. We may rue reticence if it means no action is taken until it is too late to prevent future disasters.

If it sounds like we're stuck shoveling sh*# against the tide on this one, have a look at another feature from this issue of New Scientist. Called "Building for a Cooler Planet," it starts with a couple of salient facts; namely:

• 33% of energy-related CO2 emissions are generated by energy use in buildings
  
  
• 29% of that could be cut by 2020 using existing technologies