Cutting through Quincy Market, which is, surprisingly, still crowded with a goodly number of tourists, you make your way to the waterfront and find a seat on a bench. The warm salt water plashes gently against the side of the Custom House Tower. Looking out at the tiny planes, waiting patiently in the eternal gridlock at New Logan across the harbor, you almost doze off in the torpid warmth, watching the sunlight play on the water. Slowly, the quality of light changes. You look up as a gray thunderhead drifts in and enshrouds the sun, and it starts to pour.
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We just had a taste
In May 2006, it rained for days and days. Biblical, Noah’s-ark rain. Sustained heavy showers, punctuated by drenching cloudbursts. Rain that gorged rivers and streams, collecting in small lakes on the streets. Rain that submerged parking lots and playgrounds on the North Shore and in Merrimack Valley. These scenes could have just as easily come from New Orleans’s Lower Ninth Ward. The flooding affected 14,000 homes in 40 communities. Total damage could approach $100 million.
Get used to it.
Strange and extreme spells of weather like what we saw in May are “right in line with what the models are predicting,” says Paul Kirshen, a research professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Tufts’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. Kirshen was the project director of an exhaustive study, Climate’s Long-Term Impacts on Metro Boston (CLIMB), that tried to assess the costs global warming might exact during the next century.
Four years in the making and commissioned by the Environmental Protection Agency to the tune of almost $1 million, CLIMB was the first study of the effects of global warming on a metropolitan urban area. “When people started talking about climate change in the late ’80s, mid ’90s, they focused on things like agriculture, fisheries, water supply,” says Kirshen. “Everyone said you didn’t have to worry too much about the cities. But it turns out all the infrastructure that makes city life possible depends very much on climate. Buildings are designed for certain temperatures, so they need to be cooled and heated correctly. Water-supply systems are designed for so much ground-water availability. Health systems are very climate sensitive. Infrastructure is very sensitive to climate.”
Here in Boston, we have much more than heavy rains to worry about. By 2100, the metro-Boston area can expect a six-to-10-degree-Fahrenheit rise in average temperature, according to CLIMB’s findings. Sea levels could be as much as a meter higher; heavy rains like what we had in May would cause much more extensive flooding. The city’s 100-year-old sewer systems — which by then would be 200 years old — could make for big messes. In outlying areas, wetlands and estuaries could be damaged irrevocably. With more than 30 days a year exceeding 90 degrees, energy demands could skyrocket as more and more people tried to stay cool in the summer. There will be more air pollution. There will be more health problems, resulting from higher temperatures and from disease borne by exploding bug populations. Depending on the severity of the weather, the price tag for the havoc wrought on infrastructure and for emergency services could approach $100 billion.
