The Climate Change and Cities reading makes me wonder: Does the American government have the right to preemptively move people (strip people of their rights) to protect them from something we scientifically believe will happen in the near future? The science of climate change video makes me wonder: have we predicted the physical impact of temperature increases by 2-4 degrees celsius? In particular, I’m curious to hear how much land would be lost by ocean expansion, how many cities would be covered by sea level rise (given that cities tend to form around or close to bodies of water). I’m also curious to know how many habitats will be destroyed by sea level change of any kind.
The point I most appreciate from the IPCC Extreme Events video is that weather events will affect communities differently, based essentially on how many resources that community has access to. This speaks to the unequal nature of climate change and how it very frequently comes bundled with issues of class and race. Additionally, the video raises that since there is a delay between our actions and the impacts on the climate, we will likely not see the effects of all the changes we make. This poses the challenge of balancing prevention/ relive from current disasters while working to reduce the likelihood of future disasters. This made me wonder: are there solutions that will reduce damage from current disasters while preventing future disasters from happening? For example, planting trees along the coast of Manhattan might kill two birds with one stone.
Some questions for the speakers:
How can we balance different living space desires (rural, suburban, urban) with systems of efficiency? It seems to me that urban environments, when properly designed, are the most efficient, but it would be difficult to justify forcing all people into cities.
Is it possible that there is some way to engineer some sort of human immunity to climate change? For example, in order to deal with water level changes, engineer a floating city.
Does it make any sense to essentially abandon the cities that we have and start new, taking with us all of the knowledge on sustainable systems design that we have, to essentially create an emissions free utopia?
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