Sea-ing climate change for yourself

San Francisco visualizes rising seas 2

I love living in San Francisco, where not only do we have a City Department of the Environment, but it's teamed up with the Sierra Club on an environmental art/advocacy project that is all at once simple, creative, thought-provoking, cheap, and replicable.

Today, they launched FutureSeaLevel.org to bring the climate crisis home. It's an ingeniously simple idea: Participants tape up public spaces with a line of blue tape that marks the new sea level after unchecked global warming.

In a coastal city like San Francsico, it's a disturbing sight indeed -- the blue line cuts the urban landscape mercilessly, and you can really feel yourself going under. The project launched at Pier 39 -- tourist central here in SF -- so it's getting lots of exposure.

Now if only they'll share the tape so we can try this everywhere else there's a coastline too ...

Gregory Dicum is the author of Window Seat: Reading the Landscape from the Air. He writes a biweekly column for SFGate, the online edition of the San Francisco Chronicle, and has written for the New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, Mother Jones, and others.

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  1. activista79 Posted 10:03 am
    21 Sep 2006

    love this ideaThis is a very cool idea--thank you, Sierra Club! Now, how can we do this in other cities around the country?

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  2. Simon Donner Posted 4:38 am
    22 Sep 2006

    just how high should the tape go?It is a fun idea and a simple way to visualize potential sea level rise in the future. Participants should just be sure to read all the caveats on the web-site about the uncertainty of changes in sea level, and recognize that a 3-7 m rise would not happen for centuries. Otherwise, any critics could easily, and not so wrongly, claim that the scientific results are being twisted by environmental groups.

    http://simondonner.blogspot.com

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