When I wrote the two storm impacts in the Fox books, I was projecting some future trends regarding extreme weather events and climate change. I didn’t expect to see scenes I could have written myself on the new channels this morning.
If you’re in the area affected by Ida, good luck and stay safe.
Witches and Ray-Guns 
Well, considering the other things you did to New York…
Vampires, Demons, a volcano, and a Xinti bombing come into my mind.
Well, yeah… If any of those turn out to happen in the next couple of years, I’ll be *really* worried.
My daughter lives in Manhattan but tells me her neighborhood escaped the flooding. Watching the water pouring into the subway was pretty scary to see. Fortunately everyone I know in that area came out mostly intact with little to no damage. I admit to also thinking about the Fox books and the flood defense barriers and wondering if something like that would ever be built and if I’d still be alive to see it if it did.
Yeah, the subway… One of the flood defences I put in was to replace the subway with an overhead monorail and use the old subway tunnels as storm drains. So the images of the water flooding into the tunnels was… yeah.
There are already plans to put flood defences in around New York, but there’s generally been a lack of will to pick one and get started. Maybe things like this will force their hand, but I doubt I’ll be around to see it completed. (Unless my plan to become a total cyborg or an upload works out.)
It is so expensive to build anything in NYC. I lived 125 miles North of New York and really didn’t like the place. The storm and climate change problem is that it is so near sea level. When they built the World Trade Center they were forced to build the foundations like it was a bridge pier using a coffer dam. You dig too deep and water fills the dig.
This is always my response to climate change deniers and those who say mitigation attempts are too costly … How much is NYC worth? Houston? Boston? Miami? LA? Trillions of dollars per city, and by the end of this century they are all going to be functionally unlivable. No one will insure any property in any low-laying costal area. Phoenix, Vegas, El Paso, etc.? When the residents are enduring weeks of 120+ degree temperatures paying $10 per gallon for clean water, those 100% artificial cities will dry up and blow away. It’s not the government that will force change – it’s the Almighty American God Capitalism.
According to N.O.A.A., the approximate cost of all major weather disasters in the US in the last thirty years is $1,875,000,000,000.00. Yes, that’s nearly two trillion dollars in the US alone, and the pace of multi-billion dollar weather disasters is increasing sharply.
Swiss Re, one of the world’s largest providers of insurance to other insurance companies, estimates that climate change and increasing severity of disasters will shave 11 to 14 percent off of global economic output by 2050 – or roughly $23 trillion dollars per year globally.
It’s comforting to think that we can just build a wall and keep climate change and illegal immigrants out, but it’s all a fool’s dream.