November Reading; “High Tide”

Hello all,

This month I’m doing a hard-pivot away from my intending reading/writing, but for an exciting reason: I’ve been selected as one of about 15 teams of artists, technologists, and storytellers to put together pitches for ways of telling stories of sea level rise. Of the groups, one will be selected to pitch to the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab As part of their new pilot Story Lab program.

Long-time patrons know that I’ve been mulling over climate stories for a long time, so this was a chance too good to pass up to get some direct access to the current science and the people making it, and to connect with creators with less analog approaches than mine to imagine new experiences.  

Which means it’s time to do some CRAMMING on current science on sea level rise. TL;DR - we need to take action to avoid the worst possible outcomes, but with the warming we’ve already created, a certain amount of sea level rise is inevitable by the end of the century. We still have the task of cutting emissions, but we will also need to make plans to adapt, adjust, and in many cases, simply relocate many of the places we love, cherish, and hope to preserve.

“The Water Will Come”

by Jeff Goodell

Well well well - look who’s come crawling back (it’s me, I’m back). Specifically, after dragging Jeff Goodell a bit for his overemphasis on anecdotes and human interest case studies, when the chips are down and I find myself needing to quickly know more about sea level rise, Goodell lays waiting with what I can safely assume will be a serving of facts in plain and direct language (along with pages of stuff I’ll gripe about on my own time). Part of the willingness to crack another Goodell book so soon comes from what is emerging as a theme of this challenge; how do we provide direct, compelling, and actionable entries into the available and unfortunately undeniable data in front of us? In this case, I expect to learn as much from what I think doesn’t work as I do from what does.

Related Readings:

“Moving to Higher Ground”

John Englander

Remember when I said I didn’t like Goodell’s reliance on anecdotes and tales of individual tragedy? John Englander heard that call, and wrote a pretty aggressively technical and impersonal treatise on the sea level rise we can predict, the amount we can prevent and the inevitable levels of sea level rise we no longer can do anything but prepare for. There’s a few brief stories—occasionally about when Englander advised someone and they didn’t listen, and strangely, repeated tales of Englander presenting to a city about the chance of catastrophic flooding shortly before a major storm would flood the same city (so much so Englander has considered making fewer such predictions publically).

This was quite an informative book, though difficult to get through (maybe less for the troubling news than for Englander’s unengaging delivery as a writer and audiobook narrator. Still, for me these deep dives aren’t about absorbing everything or becoming a subject expert in a month. Instead, My aim is generally to run a few sources and mediums past myself and see what sticks, what things repeat, and to notice the various phases of comprehension and understanding I pass through with each repetition.

NASA Sea Level Climate Tools

NASA Earth Science

We’ve already had a (zoom) meeting with some folks from the Earth Science team at the Jet Propulsion Lab, and as has previously been the case whenever I’ve taken a sustained look at NASA, I was pretty blown away but the amount of data they’ve been collecting, and by the number of tools and visualizers they’ve created to try to turn that data into comprehension for the public.

A few highlights:

- Flooding Analysis Tool - If your eyes glaze at graphs and spectrographs, or if your biggest question is how will “MY city be affected?,” the Flooding Analysis tool lets you punch in a location and see a pretty clear range of possible outcomes in best and worst case scenarios.
- Understanding Sea Level -  If the various components of sea level rise are still confusing for you, this series of web pages gives a pretty comprehensive overview, and includes a lot of drop-downs to allow you to explore further on topics of interest.
- Key Indicators - the conclusion of the Understanding Sea Level series, this features the phenomenal recurring captions “what are we looking at?” and “we do we care?”
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I’m curious - is there anything here you didn’t already know? Or do you bump up against one of the challenges we have telling stories about the climate; that we already have a general sense which way the story is going, and have already trained ourselves to look away, in a manner that not even specific knowledge about to where or how quickly we are on our way can change alone.