CNN’s Bill Weir: NYC Is Sinking Under the Weight of Skyscrapers and Due to Climate Change

EXCERPT:

WEIR: “Well, over a year it’s about the width of the thickness of a couple of nickels, it’s only a couple of millimeters right there, but it varies. That’s the average of the whole city of New York. Some places it’s sinking faster — Staten Island, for example, parts of Brooklyn and Queens right here. But now we know, the U.S. geological survey answered your child’s pestering question, how much does New York City weigh? 1.7 trillion pounds. That’s a pretty staggering number. And it matters because we live in the age of sea level rise thanks to the 1.7 trillion tons of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases that are in the air there. But here’s what sort of brings it home right now. This is Brooklyn, we’re in Brooklyn, looking at Manhattan, there’s the Brooklyn Bridge. This is James Carousel, a local landmark here, and here’s a picture of what superstorm Sandy did to James Carousel. You might remember that haunting picture back then. That one storm in 2012 completely rewrote the floodplain maps in New York City. There’s now an extra about 65,000 people living in a floodplain, they didn’t know they were until Sandy came along. And you can see here, you see this barge with heavy equipment and stacks of boulders, through the last couple months they have been shoring up this area that was completely washed out by superstorm Sandy, all these shops, apartment buildings, the water was in the lobby there as well, and as a result of that, the Army Corps now is looking into a number of different plans that would build various sea walls depending on the trade-offs. It’s expensive. It’s a lot to think about, but this is the reality. It’s expected that the East Coast is about — the Atlantic coast, four times more vulnerable to sea level rise than the rest of the global average, and cities that are sinking — this isn’t just happening here, it’s happening around the world, subsidence makes it worse — cities that are sinking are going to see three to four times the sea level rise. Right now the science says it could be depending on how fast we cut back on fossil fuels, anywhere from 7 inches to 2 feet by 2050, Sara. That’s that’s not that far away.”