We don’t think about these things being related: global warming and mass transit? the mortgage meltdown and disease? But look:
We had three and a half inches of rain in an hour in New York City very early this morning -- that’s basically a month’s worth of rainfall in sixty minutes. (A warmer atmosphere is a wetter atmosphere, remember.) That much rain falling that fast doesn’t have much of anywhere to go, except down to the lowest level it can find. In NYC, that’s the subway. Just in time for the morning rush, every single subway line was flooded and out of service in Manhattan, where the trains are underground; some sections of some lines in the outer boroughs are elevated, but they can’t run if there’s nowhere for them to go. We’ve had weather-related subway problems before -- most typically with extreme cold and ice -- but I cannot recall another instance in which every subway line was impacted. It was so bad that the city was telling people just to stay home, or at least to delay their morning commute.
You can’t run a city like New York when you have to tell, like, everyone to stay home because it rains. (The impact of such a shutdown, even a partial and temporary one, of a city like New York is so global that it even made the news in Britain.) And you can’t run a city like New York without a subway system, because then you end up with chaos like this:
And then, on the other side of the country, we have this:
SACRAMENTO—California officials are asking the financial services industry to make sure the swimming pools at homes in foreclosure have been drained to prevent the spread of West Nile virus.Hundreds of vacant homes with standing water have been reported to authorities in Sacramento and Yolo counties as potential mosquito breeding grounds.
The volume of abandoned homes has grown with the drop in real estate prices and the credit pinch on Wall Street, just as West Nile virus is spreading among mosquitoes. Five people have died from the virus this summer, and the state has had 80 cases.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger declared a state of emergency last week in the hardest hit counties: Kern, Colusa and San Joaquin. Kern County has reported 38 cases of the virus and two deaths.
I think the lesson is, If we think we understand the full extent of the ramifications of our fucking up the planet, the economy, the environment, and everything else, we should know that we haven’t even begun to imagine how far-reaching our actions -- or inactions -- will be.
(Technorati tags: global warming, New York City, mortgage meltdown, West Nile Virus)
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