BLDGBLOG‘s Geoff Manaugh hits one out of the park with his assessment of scientists’ maps showing, for example, how much of Florida will be obliterated by rising sea levels during the next century:
[T]hese things are actually so evocative, and so imaginatively stimulating, that it’s hard not to get at least a tiny thrill at the idea that you might get to see these things happen.
Nothing against Miami, but all of south Florida under several meters of water? With Cape Canaveral lost under a subtropical lagoon and St. Petersburg an archipelago?
The problem, it seems, is that climate change scientists, in describing these unearthly terrestrial reorganizations, are science fictionalizing, so to speak, our everyday existence. …
It could be called liberation hydrology.
Climate change becomes an adventure—the becoming-science-fiction of everyday life.