Flood (prequel)
This is a little something that Bruce Sterling wrote, in Viridian note 00272, from September 2001:
“Look at the economic impact from the sudden loss of two skyscrapers in New York City. It’s colossal. That’s straight from the file we Viridians like to label ‘world becoming uninsurable.’
“Now try to imagine New York hit by a Category 5 hurricane. Imagine the payout crisis around, say, 2050, with all the coral dead and the seas rising along entire continental coastlines. There are serious people in the re-insurance industry who claim that weather damage in the 2050s will outmatch the planet’s entire GNP. Smashing skyscrapers with aircraft full of blazing fossil fuel — that is by no means a Greenhouse disaster, it’s just a war crime. But that event is of the scope and scale of the disasters that society is courting.
“The only event that can match NYC 9.11 for sudden loss of American civilian life is the Great Galveston Hurricane of 1900. That’s an event from which Galveston, once the rival of New Orleans and the richest port in Texas, never recovered. Now we have a modern model for a major-league Greenhouse unnatural calamity. We now know what that does to people, to their morale and confidence, to the tenor of their society. We must not go there out of bland incredulity and some dismissive notion that things like that can never happen. And if we do go for there, for some godforsaken reason, we need coherent plans to claw our way back out.”
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