It’s Official: What’s Bad for Tuvalu is Bad for NYC

Even the official COP15 website has, well, copped to it. It isn't only the Global South that will fall victim to the sham targets now on the table at Copenhagen.

All along the politicians and pundits from the Global North have been suffering from a very large blindspot: they seem to think that climate change won’t really affect their own home countries. Do they think that when the oceans rise it will just be “those” oceans, not “our” oceans over here?

The world was shocked at the leak from Copenhagen that all the current targets now on the table would add up to an actual increase in global temperatures of about 3.5 C degrees. Even the politicians know that spells mass extinctions for living beings, including much of the human race.

But a new study by scientists at Princeton and Harvard shows that even under the 2 C degrees of warming scenario, which the US, the UK and the other developed nations claim is low enough to avoid catastrophic climate change, sea level rise would be sufficient to ‘commit the planet to 6 to 9 meters (20 to 30 feet) of long-term sea level rise’. That means not only Tuvalu, the Maldives and Bangla Desh (“over there”), but much of the Netherlands, southern Florida -- and Manhattan. New York City is 8 feet above current sea level in it’s lowest spots. Thirty feet of sea level rise would take out a lot of prime Manhattan real estate. (My mother owns a loft on Broadway in Soho. Luckily, her loft is on the fourth floor. Unluckily, it’s a castiron building that would pretty much melt if its lower floors were submerged.)

Hillary Clinton has just offered US support for $100 billion in aid to poorer countries to deal with climate change fallout. But if the Obama Administration keeps floating the bogus target of 17% from 2005 levels (about 4% cut from the 1990 standard the rest of the world uses), then way more than $100 billion is going to be needed to bail out the sinking ship of Manhattan Island alone. And fuggedabout Brooklyn and Queens.

If you want to check out one artist's vision of what New York will look like, check this out from Alex Rockman.

Women Hardest Hit from Climate Change, Least Empowered to Prevent It

Caroline Malema is an HIV-positive widow with six children living in Karonga, Malawi. Climate change -- along with the deforestation that helps to drive it – has brought floods that have destroyed all but one of her banana trees. Drought due to climate change is drying up the local lake, making fish less plentiful and driving up their price. She and her children have been reduced to eating mostly maize gruel -- not enough nutrition to keep her healthy or her children growing as they should.

Malema’s situation is like that of growing numbers of women in the developing world, where they make up the majority of small farmers. According to a recent UN Report, women will disproportionately bear the brunt of climate change, as gender, poverty and impacts on agriculture come together in deadly combination. More women will be driven into prostitution, unable to feed their families any other way. They will have to work longer and harder to find fuel and water for cooking. Girls will leave school earlier. And when climate change brings natural disasters, women will be more likely than men to die in them.

The issue is getting some play at the UN climate talks in Copenhagen. The international relief organization CARE is urging the delegates to take a gender-sensitive approach, prioritizing the world’s most vulnerable populations. CARE’s president, Dr. Helene Gayle, said, “Women shoulder the greatest burdens of climate change and are best positioned to help their families adapt.” She called for women to be involved in making decisions at all stages of adaptation, from the village level all the way up to global policy making.

But with ordinary citizens, youth, women and environmental organizations like Friends of the Earth International being barred from the talks (even when they have passes to the Bella Center), what's the chance that the (mostly) men leading the talks on behalf of the countries -- and corporations -- most responsible for climate change will hear that call?