New York City was not built in the 21st century. For the storms of the century

Just one on Wednesday night, it rained in New York City between 6 and 10 inches — San Jose, California, more than last year. Water rose in the basement apartments and spilled from the roofs. The rain entered the metro stations and piled up on the tracks. Remains of Hurricane Ida It shook the Gulf Coast at first, it brought floods to the northeast. Across the region, the death toll reached 40 by Thursday afternoon. Subway delays and interruptions continue.

The city’s infrastructure, you see, dates back to the 19th century. At the end of the century and the twentieth. They were built at the beginning of the century to withstand a storm that occurs every five or 10 years. Now wild storms and records are broken every year. What was left of the script was reminiscent of that scene of daily commute climate change it comes to us. Thunder of fire In the west, blackouts in Texas, hurricanes in the South“It’s all we said 20 years ago,” says climate scientist Zeke Hausfather and director of climate and energy at the Breakthrough Institute. “It’s a little wonderful to see it all together.”

The storm flooded the roads. But it also watered down alternatives to getting people out of cars: bike lanes, sidewalks, and public transportation systems. On Thursday in New York for a while, everything was under water. Images of water flowing to metro stations brought the crisis home. “You don’t have to be a person who understands infrastructure well to know that it’s a problem,” says Michael Horodniceanu, former president of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s Capital Construction Company and now president of the Institute for Construction Innovation. NYU. “I think we’re starting to see the results of what our infrastructure pays lax attention to.”

New York made its first climate-related wake-up call nine years ago Hurricane Sandy it brought a storm surge that flooded the low-lying areas and, yes, the metro stations. Since then, the city has spent nearly $ 20 million on climate testing. According to the Mayor for Resilience. But some of that funding was focused on solving a problem other than what Ida presented: water coming from the rivers. This week, all the wet stuff has fallen from the sky, threatening even areas above sea level.

Traces of the Ida dumped all this water to the northeast because of the climatic rarity. You can expect less rain on a warming planet, but in some parts of the world, in the northeastern and midwestern United States go up in heavy rainfall. Temperature directly affects how much moisture the atmosphere can “contain” before it starts to rain, Hausfather says. Cooler air has less moisture and warmer air has more moisture that falls as rain.

A hurricane feeds on heat: Ida strengthened so quickly that it pushed the abnormal hot waters of the Gulf of Mexico before it hit the ground, creating winds of 150 miles per hour. As the rotating mass in the warm air, Ida retained a lot of moisture. So even as the winds were blowing inland, the storm carried a tremendous amount of moisture to the north, with many states on the way.

Climate change did not cause Hurricane Ida, but scientists know how climate change can worsen hurricanes like Ida. “It’s one of the most basic physical relationships we have in the climate: every degree [Celsius] you heat the atmosphere, you get about 7 percent more air in the air, which means you can have much higher rainfall, ”says Hausfather. they have been accelerating faster than hurricanes in recent years, as Ida did, as the waters in the gulf are warming.

No one could have foreseen this when the bones of New York City came together more than 100 years ago. When engineers dream of a sewer system, they can imagine the worst storm that can only come once every 10 or 20 years. It is designed to make a storm every five years in New York. Scientists have yet to board the monster that has flooded the city, but it is certain that hell was not a handshake. The metric would be similar for centuries.