Abstract
The existential global threat of inundation of the world’s low-lying port cities necessitates a radical shift in the dominant climate framework of sustainability and resilience to include catastrophism. Scientists and social scientists of the industrial crisis decade of the 1840s, arguably the Anthropocene’s historical origin, offer a model for theorizing twenty-first century catastrophe in both geophysical and social terms, as in the case study of Hurricane Sandy presented here.
Highlights
In the summer of 2015, I vacationed with my family on the New Jersey Shore
Urged to rescue the New Jersey beaches claimed by Hurricane Sandy, Governor Christie committed
Why is sea level rise (SLR) disproportionately higher at the coasts? Local SLR, as opposed to a global average, follows a complex spatial pattern. Both the dynamic redistribution of ocean mass under climate change and the gravitational effects of melting ice sheets and glaciers deposited in the ocean favor higher coastal SLR (Kopp et al 2014)
Summary
In the summer of 2015, I vacationed with my family on the New Jersey Shore. Urged to rescue the New Jersey beaches claimed by Hurricane Sandy, Governor Christie committed. $5 billion to dredging 30 million cubic yards of Atlantic Ocean seafloor back to shore. His aim was twofold: to guarantee the native claim of all New Jerseyans to a towel’s length of summer sand; and to protect the billions worth of beachside properties reliant on bulky dunes to repel future Sandys. Hurricane Sandy is, in one sense, an overdetermined case study and parochial to the United States, but its purpose here is illustrative rather than comprehensive—one model of the disastrous urban coastal inundation events already underway globally and whose impacts cross hemispheric and national boundaries. Two notable catastrophist thinkers of that decade, Friedrich Engels and Joseph Adhémar, offer exemplary repudiations of status quo delusion with regard to social and physical systems, respectively
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