Down to the wire : confronting climate collapse / David - Index of

32 S politics and governance
A third implication of the long emergency is that government
will be required to take unprecedented measures to relocate people
displaced by drought, storms, and continuously rising sea levels.
A sizeable fraction of the U.S. population now lives within 100 miles
of a coast and is therefore vulnerable to both increased severity
of storms and rising sea levels. Hurricanes Katrina (in 2005) and
Ike (in 2008) preview what lies ahead as larger and probably more
frequent storms batter coasts. The scientifi c evidence cited above
indicates that ice in Greenland and Antarctica is melting much
more rapidly than previously thought. As a result, sea levels will
eventually inundate coasts worldwide, including U.S. cities such
as New Orleans, Miami, Charleston, Washington, Baltimore, New
York, and Boston. We may choose to protect some with dikes, but
that will be hugely expensive and probably doomed to failure if
global temperatures increase much beyond 2°C. In that situation,
the more likely scenario is that millions of people will be forced to
leave their homes and property and move to higher ground. But
it is not just the people living along coastlines who are at risk. As
the mid-continent becomes hotter and drier and subject to more
severe tornadoes, storms, and fl oods like that of 2008 in Iowa or
worse, the region will become less habitable as well. As rainfall
diminishes in the Southwest, one plausible scenario is that:
Businesses and families begin to abandon Phoenix, creating a
Grapes of Wrath–like exodus in reverse. Long lines of vehicles
clog the freeways, heading east toward the Mississippi and north
toward Oregon and Washington. Burning hot, parched, and broke,
the city that rose from the ashes achieves its apogee and falls back
toward the fi re. (Powell, 2008, p. 240)
In short, governments will have to relocate and house growing
numbers of people. In the decades ahead, we must prepare for a
future in which large storms, fl ood, fi re, and drought, as well as
acts of terrorism, will become the norm. The capacity of emergency
management will have to be made much more robust and
effective, not just for intermittent events but for multiple events,